A paedophile, who abused girls as young as eight over a 50-year period, told a court his victims ‘enjoyed and wanted’ to be raped.

Peter Ashford was jailed for 12 years and eight months for abusing girls between the ages of eight and 13.  Among the 27 charges he admitted were incidents of rape, attempted rape, sexual abuse and indecent assault, the NZHerald reports.

The 82-year-old of Auckland, New Zealand, tried to blame his offence on his first victim, saying if she had reported him to the police, he would have been stopped long ago.

Judge Bergseng told Manukau District Court on Friday that in his police interview, Ashford said that at the time of the crime, all the girls ‘wanted it.’ He said the children ‘enjoyed and wanted’ his sexual advances and that he only did to them ‘what they asked for.’

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The judge also said that when speaking to a court report writer, Ashford tried to minimise his offence, saying “that on numerous occasions you didn’t know what you were doing was wrong.” “They don’t teach you those things”,’ the judge said.

Ashford began offending in the 1960s when he was in his early 30s and all his young victims were known to him and were often left alone with him. His first victim was just eight years old when he attempted to rape her in her bed. She told her mother, who refused to believe her, the court heard.

The second victim was abused by Ashford for three years in the 1980s, starting when she was 13. From 2006 up until after he turned 80 in 2016, he repeatedly sexually abused a group of girls aged between 8 and 11. A number of his victims – some still young girls, teenagers and some adult women – sat and listened as Judge Bergseng relayed the harrowing details of their abuse.

When sentencing began, the judge had to tell the paedophile to ‘stop staring’ at his victims in court. Earlier, the court heard that Ashford would often abuse his victims in front of other children.

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On one occasion, he lined up five girls and sexually abused them in turn, he would then ‘reward’ the girls with food or money after threatening them, saying if they told anyone what he was doing, they would be punished.