Is It Appropriate to Release Names Guilty of Sexual Harassment?Court Ruling Shines Light on Hidden Overtime––Working on WeChatThe Ministry of Education has asked schools and universities to conduct mandatory background checks on candidates who work on campuses for sexual crimes before they are hired. For primary and secondary schools, when they plan to hire staff, they need to submit an application to local education authorities to check the national teacher management information system whether the candidates have committed sex crimes, according to a notice issued by the ministry on April 21, 2023.They also need to check whether the candidates have been included on the blacklist for teachers and whether their teaching credentials are valid or not, the notice said.Higher education institutions should conduct the checks themselves, it said.The notice also stressed that education authorities and universities should not violate the privacy of the candidates when checking the information.If the candidates are found to have previous sexual crimes or other crimes making them unfit to work on campuses, the schools should notify them in writing and the candidates will be eligible to ask that checks be done again. Education authorities and universities should not violate the privacy of the candidates when checking the information, the notice added.A guideline issued by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Education in November said people who have committed crimes such as sexual assault, abuse, abduction and violence against children should be banned for life from working in the education sector.Those who have served prison sentences and are deprived of their political rights are also banned for life from working in the sector.The guideline has asked the courts to inform education authorities of such verdicts within 30 days of the ruling. In China, the Criminal Law, the Law on the Protection of Minors, the Teachers Law and the Regulation on Teachers' Qualifications all stipulate that people with specific criminal records cannot work as teachers and staff in educational institutions.It is said the new measures can help enforce previous laws and regulations and prevent people with certain criminal records from becoming teachers or from working on campuses.While the laws have been clear, in reality, some education authorities had difficulties in obtaining the criminal records of people, especially if they were from a different region, and there were also cases where authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to people with criminal records and let them enter campuses, according to a researcher at the Institute of Education and Economy Research.Also on the same day, the education ministry published on its website the names of seven teachers who have violated work ethics, including one who had been stripped of his teaching credentials and put on a blacklist for teaching after he sexually harassed female students by sending them obscene texts, pictures, videos and touched them inappropriately, and another who had been sentenced to eight years in prison for sexual assault and molesting underage female students.