A PAEDOPHILE has been jailed for four years for 15 sexual offences involving two underage girls.

Paul Joseph Watson, now 22, had sex with the older girl two or three times a week for months, knowing she was 14 and despite warnings to stay away from her, said Chloe Fairley, prosecuting.

He had unprotected sex with her in their houses, in friends' houses, in public toilets and at York Explore library in the city centre, and after both had been drinking vodka that he had bought for them.

Watson kept sexual pictures of both her and another 14-year-old girl with whom he had sex twice on one day and he got both to separately perform sex acts on themselves while he watched via Skype.

He got the younger girl to sit naked in his room while he chatted online to another girl.

Released on bail, he downloaded more than 2,000 indecent images and videos of children as young as four being abused, including a film of a man doing the same painful sexual act on a 14-year-old girl that he had done on the older victim.

"Your interest in children continues," Judge Tom Bayliss QC told him. "Here there are a multiplicity of aggravating factors. I have to impose a prison sentence on you and a prison sentence of some length."

He jailed Watson for four years, put him on the sex offender register for life and made him subject to a sexual harm prevention order also for life restricting his use of the internet and banning him from having contact with underage girls.

Watson, formerly of Lower Ebor Street, South Bank, pleaded guilty to seven charges of sexual activity with a child and three of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity committed when he was 18 and five of making indecent images of children.

According to a defence psychiatric report, Watson was suffering from an "emotionally unstable personality disorder" at the time of the sexual abuse.

For him Glenn Parsons said the medical and other reports showed that Watson had matured and changed since his initial arrest.

At the time of the sexual activity, he had been feeling isolated and abandoned.

He accepted that he had suggested the sexual activities he had performed with the older girl and had repeated suggestions more than once, and that she may have felt under pressure to do as he wanted. He denied threatening her in any way.

The older girl told police he had given her cannabis to smoke. Watson denies this.