A MUSIC teacher and sex offender has been banned from being alone with children for the rest of his life.
Kenneth Nelson, 55, told police officers he found "pre-teen children attractive," said Joe Culley, prosecuting.
They were interviewing him after finding more than 16,000 sexual or indecent images of children on his laptop and memory storage devices at his home.
His solicitor Lee-Anne Robins-Hicks said he had sent letters to all his now former students and their parents about the case and the effect on their music lessons.
"His employment became untenable at the start of these proceedings," she said on York Crown Court.
Nelson, of Garth Close, Wistow, was given a six-month prison sentence suspended for 12 months on condition he does 20 days' rehabilitative activities.
He was also made subject to a sexual harm prevention order banning him from having unsupervised contact with children under 16 and curtailing his use of the internet indefinitely, and put on the sex offenders' register for seven years.
He pleaded guilty to three charges of having indecent images of children and one of having a prohibited image of a child.
Mr Culley said of the 16,297 pictures found by police, 16,176 were in the least serious category. Officers also found 87 prohibited images of children.
The children in them were mostly aged between six and 12, but some could have been as young as four and some as old as 14.
Police raided Nelson's home after he posted one of the images on the social media website Pinterest on June 14. He told them he had tried to remove it without success.
Mrs Robins-Hicks said the images showing more serious sexual abuse had been downloaded accidentally when he had been making bulk downloads.
Nelson said he had been going through a period of emotional strain following the break-up of his marriage and this led him to commit the offences.
He suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder so felt compelled to repeat his illegal behaviour time and time again.
He was now seeing his GP for help with his mental health difficulties which had contributed to his offending.
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