The daughter of a Jehovah’s Witness who subjected her and a sister to sickening sexual abuse said she still bore the scars of her father’s offending.

Dennis Cottee, was given a two year supervision order last September after Swindon jurors found 12 allegations against him proven. The charges included the rape of his elder daughter and repeated assaults on the younger girl.

The woman’s brother, Jacques Cottee, was jailed for three years and 10 months. Jurors found him guilty of incest, relating to an incident when he had molested the elder sister on the way back from watching a film in Swindon in the early 1980s.

Speaking a year on from the trial, the younger sister – now in her 50s – told the Adver seeing a counsellor had helped her come to terms with what had happened to her when she was growing up. Although she said she still had the scars over those early experience.

The woman, who spoke out on condition she was not named, said she had been reluctant to report her father to the police at first.

“You hear stories of how awful the process is and I was frightened of opening up a can of worms,” she said.

“What encouraged me to take the case to the court was the devastating revelation during the police investigation of my sister’s abuse. I realised that the brother I had grown up with wasn’t the person I thought he was.

“Justice for me was about the truth, I wanted anyone who were or had been close to my family to see my father and brother for the abusers that they had become.

“Justice for me was not a search for a long sentence, it was a search for closure and the truth.”

During the trial, the court heard Dennis Cottee had begun abusing his older daughter after she started at secondary school. He had got her to perform sex acts on him as he drove back to their farm, had simulated sex and finally – when she was in her mid-teens – had raped her.

The abuse of the younger daughter began when she was just four-years-old, with Cottee getting the youngster to perform a sex act on him as they were parked in his car outside shops in Cricklade.

He had simulated sex with her in the animal sheds on the family farm, north west of Swindon. On one occasion, he had molested the girl on an upstairs landing in the farmhouse.

40 years on from her terrible ordeal, the younger sister said: “I now know that I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. The relationship I had with my father was obviously scarred by the abuse and I grew up unable to talk to him in a way that a normal daughter-father relationship should. It is sad that as he has got older he couldn’t say sorry for his actions.”

She praised the support she had received from the police, the prosecution lawyer Tara Wolfe and the sensitive approach taken by Judge Jason Taylor QC who heard the trial.

“Everyone involved in the process was incredibly sensitive and supportive. I would urge anyone who has experienced sexual abuse to go to the police,” the woman said.