Description
A teenager has been jailed for sexually abusing children at the nursery where he worked.
Jayden McCarthy, 18, will serve 11 years and six months with an extended licence of three years, a judge at Exeter Crown Court ruled.
McCarthy was found guilty of one charge of rape and 13 of sexual assault at the nursery in Torbay by a jury in May.
He was also found guilty of two counts of raping a boy in a separate incident in 2014.
An investigation was launched when a child at the nursery McCarthy worked at told her parents that he had sexually assaulted her.
At McCarthy's trial at Exeter Crown Court the jury were shown 13 CCTV clips taken in July 2019 of him touching eight children inappropriately.
He had been taken on as an apprentice in March 2019 following an interview process and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
The father of one of the victims told the court that his family had been through the "fires of hell" over the last two years, suffered from anxiety and depression and that McCarthy had "broken" them.
'Emotionally challenging'
Judge David Evans said McCarthy, who was 16 at the time of the offences, posed a high level of risk given he could "barely contain" his sexual impulses while working at the nursery.
"You were placed in a specific position of trust and you exploited that situation," he told him.
"It seems to me that sexual offending may be in your nature and a great deal of work may be needed to work it out," the judge added.
Det Ch Insp James Stock, from the Public Protection Unit at Devon and Cornwall Police, said it had been an "emotionally challenging and incredibly complex case".
An independent review into McCarthy's abuse, commissioned by Torbay's Safeguarding Partnership, is now due to be completed.