A SCHOOLBOY is accused of raping his four-year-old sister – bribing her to keep quiet with Skittles.

The girl, who is now five, confessed her ordeal to her mother while having a bath and said it happened when her brother was aged 12, a court heard.

The boy, who is now aged 13, is on trial for two separate counts of rape and a sexual assault alleged to have taken place between January and August last year.

Giving evidence to Brighton Magistrate’s Court, the girl’s mother broke down in tears as she described how her little girl had told her about her ordeal.

“She said to me ‘Mummy I want to tell you something’. She didn’t normally say things with such an introductory manner,” the girl’s mother said.

“She wanted to tell me. It was something important to her.

“She said it happened while they were playing hide and seek.

“She said she didn’t like it and didn’t want to do it.

“Afterwards I put her to bed and cuddled her and told her she was a very brave girl for telling Mummy.

“That was the only time they had played hide and seek on the stair unsupervised.”

The mother said that the girl had divulged further details about a week later – giving details of at least two occasions when she was raped and another time she was sexually assaulted while playing hide and seek, and that the boy had given her sweets and told her to keep quiet.

Her mother said: “She said he offered her sweeties to do this.

“She said she didn’t like it but she liked the sweeties.

“I said to her liking sweeties was perfectly all right but he should never have offered her sweets to do something like that.

“She was clearly disgusted.

“She said ‘he made me like Skittles’. She was clearly cross about that.”

“She said ‘don’t tell him’ because he had told her not to say anything.

“I said to her ‘why didn’t you tell Mummy?’ and she said ‘he told me not to’.

“She told me it had happened a thousand times.

“But she doesn’t understand exactly what a thousand means, but that it means many.”

The mother said that her daughter and half brother – who would visit their flat every couple of weeks – had previously had a good relationship, and “he seemed to care about her”.

She added: “Then suddenly she kept saying ‘I don’t like him’, that he was cheating her – but that was her language at the time for teasing.

“She stopped looking forward to his visits.

“The mother said the girl had shown her on a doll how she had been abused.”

The mother told the court that after her daughter’s confession she had told the children’s father, then called the NSPCC who contacted the police on her behalf.

The court was told that the boy’s father – who is also the father of his alleged victim – and his mother, who is not the mother of the girl, had refused to engage with social services in an attempt to seek an alternative way of dealing with his behaviour.

The boy, who was 12 at the time of the alleged offences last year, denies two counts of rape and one of sexual touching.

His trial was adjourned until August 16.