Loopholes need to be plugged for excluding unqualified foreign teachers

Were it not for a father discovering his 12-year-old daughter was being sexually exploited and blackmailed by her former English teacher from the United States, the then employee of EF Education First, a language training company headquartered in Shanghai, 47-year-old Curtis J. Baldwin from Springfield, Missouri, might still be at large.

Were it not for the US Department of Justice reporting the case on Oct 6 as a testimony to its zero tolerance to the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse within the framework of Project Safe Childhood, an initiative it launched in 2006, the case might not have been noticed.

According to the report of the Department of Justice, Baldwin pleaded guilty in federal court to sexually exploiting one of his former students by attempting to blackmail her into sending him pornographic images on Oct 5.