March 2012 Rapist Robert Caldwell jailed for 10 years for an attack on a 14-year-old girl A woman told how she scrubbed her skin raw to wash away a rapist who is today beginning a 10-year jail sentence. The victim only came forward last year, several years after Robert Caldwell, now 25, raped her when he was a teenager and she was just 14 years old. Crown Court heard that her attacker from Pen y Groes, Penyreheol, Caerphilly was arrested the day she reported the crime and gave a ‘no comment’ interview to police officers. But he later pleaded guilty to rape and was told he will now be on the sex offenders register for the rest of his life. Judge Rhys Rowlands said the girl had been completely innocent and his actions meant her first sexual experience had been with him. “She lost her virginity in the most horrific circumstances” he told him. Lawyers for Caldwell said he had had a difficult upbringing which had ‘blurred his moral edges’. But when confronted with the pain and distress he had caused the girl, he was remorseful, saying, “I can’t believe what I did to her”. The court was told that people she tried to tell previously, when she was younger, had been reluctant to believe her. Judge Rowlands said:”What others chose to believe is a matter for them. “He(Caldwell) is clear in his guilty pleas that he committed these offences against her.” Prosecutor Mike Hammett said as well forcing the girl to have intercourse with him, the defendant had also made her perform a sex act on him after grabbing her by her hair. She told him he was hurting her and was crying but he carried on, telling her “You will not get pregnant – no one will know”. Mr Hammett said:”She said afterwards she showered and scrubbed herself until she was raw.” In a victim impact statement, she said: “What he did to me is always on my mind. “He took away any chance of me having a nice life”. The judge told Caldwell he had taken advantage in a thoroughly depraved way when she was just a child. “I accept you are now sorry”, he said. “But she has had to live with it, while you thought, all that time, that you had got away with it.” He was banned from ever working with children at any time in the future.