A PENSIONER has appeared in court charged with seven counts of historic sex abuse.

Robert West, of Whitehall Road, Colchester, attended Ipswich Crown Court on Wednesday where he was accused of a range of sex offences which date from the 1980s through until the early 2000s.

Two of his alleged victims were teenage girls at the time the abuse is said to have taken place.

They reported West to the police in 2020, with one saying she had been repeatedly sexually abused.

West, now 67, is charged with seven offences in total - one count of rape, four counts of indecently assaulting a child and two counts of indecency with a child.

He denies all the allegations.

Addressing members of the jury, Edmund Burge, prosecuting, said West’s campaign of abuse took place over the course of three decades with his youngest victim aged seven or eight.

The jury heard West allegedly assaulted another victim by repeatedly touching her when the two were alone in Colchester.

The court was told West raped one of his victims in the 1980s.

The victim then gave birth to a child while she was still a teenager and it was only then the abuse came to an end.

The court heard how the victim initially said a boy from school was the father, before DNA tests decades later found West was, in fact, the father.

Mr Burge then explained how West targeted one of his victims.

He said: “[The victim] was psychologically assessed and falls in the bottom 15 per cent of the population in terms of IQ – that made her particularly vulnerable to abuse of this sort, a factor exploited by the defendant in that he groomed her over time.

“He told her no-one would believe her if she told anyone about it and that it was their secret.”

The trial continues.