A WOMAN who says she suffered sexual abuse as a child found the courage to stand up to her alleged abuser, a court heard.

The woman, who cannot be identified, says she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Philip Oliver in Worcester during the 1970s.

The 70-year-old defendant of Wilson Road, Shurdington, near Cheltenham, is on trial at Worcester Crown Court where he denies 12 sexual offences said to have been committed in Dines Green, Worcester, between 1971 and 1980, beginning when the girl was four or five years old.

In total he denies six indecent assaults against a child, four counts of indecency with a child, one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under 16 and one count of attempting to have sexual intercourse with a girl aged under 16.

In a video-recorded interview with police in 2016 she said she was concerned Oliver would abuse other children.

When she was an adult she said she challenged Oliver in the back of his white Lada and gave him a photograph of herself when she was a girl, asking him if he remembered the time he bit off her top.

She said: “It was like the whole of his being died, the whole of the blood rush was gone. Silence.

"And he laughed and said ‘is that all you’ve got to say?”

The complainant said she swore at Oliver and told him if he did not go away she would call the police. She said when someone else learnt about the alleged abuse, it gave her ‘courage’.

“Once you have started, you don’t stop” she told the police interviewer.

Previously she had described how he performed sex acts on her and encouraged her to perform sex acts upon him.

She described his furry tongue, smelly breath, the smell of ‘fags’, the ‘horrible’ big brown fingernails on his ‘sharp and rough hands’ and the rough feeling of his whiskers on her face.

He had condoms but she said she was ‘innocent’ and believed they were balloons.

The complainant said Oliver had either had full sex with her or attempted to have full sex.

The alleged victim referred to him tickling her and said he was in ‘total control’ and that she felt ‘smothered’.

“I couldn’t get away.

"It wasn’t nice” she said.

She said of the sexual activity: “He had his hand over my mouth.

"I don’t know whether that was for me to be quiet or stop me crying out.

"I don’t know,” she said.

The trial continues.