By Kang Shin-who

A native-English teacher has been sentenced 18 months to prison for sexually harassing a five-year-old child. The Seoul High Court said Monday that it upheld a lower court’s ruling on the Canadian man. The personal information of the foreign teacher will be open to the public for five years.

The teacher came to Korea in 1999 and had been teaching children English at his home. He was indicted on charges of having sexually harassed one of his male pupils between April 2009 and February 2010 on five occasions.

“It is a very serious crime, given the victim was only a five-year-old and he inflicted huge psychological pain on the child,” the court said in its verdict. “To prevent similar incidents, such sexual crimes should be dealt with harshly.”

The court said it upheld the ruling in consideration of the teacher promising to receive psychiatric treatment after returning to Canada and reaching a settlement with the victim’s parents.