BARRISTERS have summed up their cases in the trial at Oxford Crown Court of a man accused of sexually abusing boys during the 1970s and 1980s.

Rodney Smallman, of Erica Close, Banbury, denies 20 counts of indecent assault on six boys, now adults, from February 1976 to March 1983.

The 72-year-old ran a children’s home in Oxfordshire at the time and allegedly asked young boys to line up naked outside his bedroom while he watched them through a crack in the door.

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Yesterday prosecutor Giles Curtis-Raleigh said Smallman also had a previous conviction for indecent assault from the 1980s.

He said: “As a matter of common sense it is not possible that they are making it up. He has a propensity, a tendency towards this sort of behaviour, and that makes it far more likely that he acted in the way that all these men have alleged.

“The Crown says there is frankly overwhelming power in all these separate people coming forward now with basically similar allegations against a man who has acted this way in the past.”

But defence barrister Jennifer Edwards said her client had been subjected to a “character assassination”.

She said: “Mr Smallman made it plain when he was giving evidence that he has an element of suspicion that there has been some sort of collusion among the witnesses.

“He accepts a good deal of what has been said against him, but he gives it a different connotation,” she added.

The trial continues.

 


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