An 11-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his stepmother by his own father in an attempt to “cure” him of homosexuality, a court in England heard.

Daniel Dowling, now 36, said during the trial he suffered three years of sexual torment at the home he grew up in, in Bracknell, Berkshire, where he was made to watch pornography and forced into threesomes with his father and his stepmother. He said his dad tried to punch him when he refused to have sex with his her.

He was still haunted by the horrifying experience and even by the smell of his stepmother’s perfume, he added.

Richard Dowling, his father, was jailed for five years and his ex-partner Annette Breakspear was sentenced to eight years.

“It was Dad’s job to protect me. They stole my innocence and ruined my childhood. I can never get past that,” he told Mirror on Saturday.

He said the abuse started when the family was playing a board game, when his father told him: “We were going to try something different – to take our clothes off whenever someone lost.” By the end of the game, his stepmother was “completely naked.”

“They instructed me to touch and kiss her breasts. Dad was encouraging me to do it so I thought it was okay. I think that night was a tester of how I’d react because intercourse started after that,” he said.

He was abused over 10 times in three years. While recalling another incident, Daniel said his dad picked him up from Scouts, took him home and told him to “give Breakspear a goodnight kiss.”

“I went into their room and she was handcuffed to the bed naked. I gave her a kiss and went to leave but she asked me to touch her and to untie one of her hands. We had intercourse and Dad came and joined in,” he said.

“We’d watch porn in bed together and then we’d have threesomes. She’d instruct me on what to do. Sometimes when Dad wasn’t there she’d ask me into her room for fondling and intercourse. I was an only child and I spent a lot of time playing Lego but she’d come in and ask me to do things to her,” he added.

“I was sexualized at such a young age that sex means nothing to me now. The few positive memories of my childhood are tarnished by memories of the abuse. When I smell someone wearing her perfume, or see that board game in a shop or on TV, it brings the memories back,” he said.

In an attempt to explain himself during the trial, his father said he abused his son “to try and steer him in the right direction and not to go to the way of being gay, because there was like, sort of, tendencies for him to be gay.”

“All I ever wanted was for him to turn out the right way,” he added.

Daniel said the abuse stopped only after Richard and Breakspear split up around 1996, and the teenager and his father moved to Weymouth, Dorset.

However, his ordeal did not completely stop. In Weymouth, he was targeted by another pedophile, whose home was later raided by the police, where naked pictures of the boy were found.

As a teenager, he was interviewed by a child psychologist when he revealed the trauma he had gone through for years. His father told police at the time his son was an “attention seeking” liar, and no arrests were made. The teenager then tried to kill himself.

During the trial which began in May this year, the victim claimed the police treated him “shoddily” in his interview. He said after almost two decades of not getting justice, he secretly recorded a phone conversation in 2015 during which his father admitted the abuse.

In the court, his father claimed the abuse was to prevent Daniel “turning gay”, to “protect him from pedophiles so he would know what was right and wrong.”

While Richard admitted one count of cruelty to a child and two counts relating to sexual offences, Breakspear was found guilty of three counts of indecent assault.