A SENIOR social services manager was yesterday jailed for 18 years after being convicted of IS sexual assaults against children in care. Judge Huw Daniel described Keith Laverack (52) as a "career paedophile".
He told him that it was unquestionably the most serious case of its kind he could remember and that it would no doubt cause tremendous public outrage.
Laverack had denied 20 charges of sexually assaulting youngsters during a career of more than 20 years as a teacher and headmaster at children's homes in Cheshire and Cambridgeshire.
But the jury of eight woman and four men found him guilty of IS of the charges - 11 of buggery and four of indecent assault after almost nine hours of deliberation at Chester Crown Court.
Laverack stood with his head bowed in the dock, occasionally closing his eyes as the judge passed sentence, many of his victims listening intently behind him in the packed public gallery.
The judge told him: "None of those young children you buggered consented to what happened to them. They were raped, many of them, by you with violence and force. They submitted through fear of violence.
He said that in the circumstances there was little else they could do - and they were humiliated and oppressed in their own minds by what happened to them.
"They had to live with it for years, locking it away, trying not to think of the appalling things you did to them.
"You made them go through the ordeal of having to recall what happened to them and suffer what many of them regard as public humiliation by having to go through the whole thing in public in giving evidence.
"You were merciless to them at the time and you showed no mercy when you were found out. You abused your position of power."