A day care worker was arrested Saturday on charges of child abuse after closed-circuit TV footage showing her slapping a 4-year-old girl sparked public outrage across the country early last week. A police investigation revealed the 33-year-old female worker had abused other preschool children at the day care facility in Incheon on at least four other occasions since September.

Ruling Saenuri Party leader Kim Moo-sung described the taped scene of the little girl being beaten to the floor by her nanny for not finishing her meal as the most shocking case since last April’s ferry disaster, which left more than 300 people dead. His remark did not sound exaggerated to the public, especially to the tens of thousands of parents who leave their children at day care centers.

But Kim and other politicians should be ashamed of their failure to enact laws aimed at preventing preschool child abuse. Over the past decade, several bills designed to strengthen monitoring and supervision of day care facilities have been submitted to parliament only to be discarded or shelved in the face of objection from nursery workers. In particular, they have insisted that the proposal to install surveillance cameras at all day care centers would intrude on their privacy and treat them as potential criminals.

But their claims can hardly be justified as abuses continue to take place at nurseries. Their privacy cannot be placed ahead of the need to protect children who are too young to defend themselves from abusive teachers.

The ruling party and the Welfare Ministry hurriedly put forward a package of measures to increase child protection at day care centers, which included obliging all facilities to install CCTV and disclose the footage when parents request it. It was also right to strengthen qualifications for child care workers.

But the “one strike” system, in which any day care center is forced to shut down after a single case of abuse is found, needs to be reconsidered, as it would make it more difficult for parents to find a place to take care of their child. Missing from the package are considerations to improve conditions at nurseries and the treatment of their employees.

Lawmakers should fine-tune and pass the proposed measures in the upcoming parliamentary session next month to prevent such shocking cases ― that have even led the ruling party leader to invoke the memory of the ferry disaster ― from recurring in the future.