THIS is the face of child rapist Jason Rabenda who is beginning a jail term of nearly seven years today for attacking a 13-year-old girl.

The 24-year-old, of Matson Road, Ipswich, assaulted the teenager twice at a house in north-west Ipswich, and tried to cover up the attacks by telling police the girl was lying.

Jailing Rabenda for six years and eight months, with an extended licence period of two years and four months, Judge Rupert Overbury said the defendant had acted “in pursuit of his own sexual gratification with no regard to the girl’s protests”.

The judge told Ipswich Crown Court that when Rabenda, formerly of Buregate Road, Felixstowe, was questioned by police he had initially lied and said nothing had happened.

He told officers the girl had made sexual advances to him and that she had lied about him raping her because he had turned her down.

“This was a gross and cruel lie,” the judge said.

Rabenda was visiting the house where the schoolgirl was staying and had pushed her inside a bathroom and trapped her by locking the door, Ipswich Crown Court heard.

He had then ignored her protests to leave her alone and had raped her after removing her trousers, said Michael Crimp, prosecuting.

Rabenda admitted raping the girl and sexually assaulting her on September 23 last year.

Neil Saunders, for Rabenda, said although his client had a number of previous convictions, there were none for sexual offences.

He asked for his client to be given credit for pleading guilty and saving the girl the ordeal of giving evidence in court, adding that Rabenda had problems with alcohol.

On that occasion Recorder Michael Pooles QC tore into him for betraying the mercy of a court after Rabenda stole �135 from the former Hare and Hounds pub in Norwich Road, Ipswich, in December 2010 while on a two-year suspended sentence.

In January last year, Rabenda was jailed for six months and two weeks after admitting theft and breaching a suspended sentence he was given for a house burglary.

The judge said: “You come before this court three months after a judge exercised a very substantial degree of mercy upon you. Within weeks of that merciful sentence, you were in breach of it.”