A CHILD rapist from Alloa who took underage girls to watch prostitutes soliciting on the streets was jailed for eight years last week.

A judge praised the courage of victims who came forward to secure convictions against former rail worker James Adam.

Lord Pentland told the 80-year-old: "You must have thought you had succeeded in escaping justice for what you did."

Adam, formerly of Bellevue Road, Alloa, preyed on three girls during a catalogue of sexual offending committed between 1975 and 2001.

Lord Pentland said he had engaged in manipulative and grooming behaviour to take advantage of victims for his own gratification.

The judge said: "Regrettably, you have evinced no remorse or empathy for your victims and appear to have no insight into the harm your abuse has caused."

Lord Pentland told Adam, who was brought into court in a wheelchair, that he would be on the sex offenders' register for the remainder of his life.

Adam had earlier denied a catalogue of offences committed against the girls over 26 years but was found guilty of five offences of indecency, a rape and an indecent assault following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh.

Adam took two girls to watch streetwalkers plying their trade and later subjected one of them to a rape ordeal at a house in Alloa when she was aged 15. He exposed himself to the second girl when she was aged 12.

He targeted another victim from the age of four and repeatedly molested her at addresses in Alloa and Sauchie, and at Holytown, in Lanarkshire, before carrying out a sex attack on her when she was a teenager in a car in Sauchie in 2001.

Adam began his sex offending in 1975 after grooming a vulnerable girl with car trips and cash.

The victim, now aged 53, said that Adam would take her to an area of Glasgow during outings. She said: "There was lots of women walking up and down. I now know it was a place for prostitutes."

She said they would sit in the car and Adam asked her whether she wanted to do that when she was older.

The woman said: "He used to take me runs in his car quite a lot. He used to buy me chip shop suppers. He used to give me money."

She said she was "going on 11, still 10" when she first met him and added it felt great at the time getting that attention from him.

The woman said she came from a "quite poor" background and her mother had a drink problem and she spent periods in residential care during her childhood.

She said Adam began getting her to carry out sex acts on him. She said: "It all started when I was 10."

The woman said Adam would laugh at her and touch her and make comments about her body and get her to perform "sexual favours".

She said that on a few occasions she went to a former home of Adam in Alloa and told the court: "It was there when I was 15, that's when he had sex with me."

She told advocate depute Dorothy Bain QC that he worked for the railway and she would visit the signal box where he was employed, but could not remember if sexual contact took place there.

Defence counsel Paul Harvey said he accepted a "significant" sentence would be imposed on Adam, but pointed out that 18 years has passed since the last offence.