The Safeguarding Gap: Most Martial Arts Schools Sit Outside Every System Built to Protect Children

Martial Arts Professional editorial. Every case described below is sourced to a named court, police force or news outlet, and linked. Allegations that have not been tested in court are described as allegations throughout.

The short answer

In the six weeks to 17 September 2026, a martial arts instructor was jailed for 25 years in London, a jiu-jitsu coach was arrested in New Mexico on a Florida warrant involving a 16-year-old student, and a South Korean appellate court upheld a seven-year sentence against a taekwondo instructor who abused a 12-year-old. Three continents, three arts, three unrelated defendants.

The story for school owners is not the crimes. It is this: if you run a commercial martial arts school in the United States and you are not affiliated to an Olympic national governing body, you are outside the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s jurisdiction entirely. You are probably also outside your state’s youth-sports screening statute, because most of those statutes are written around teams, not classes. The organisation currently doing the most to regulate your safeguarding practice is your insurer.

What actually happened

London: 25 years

Anthony Swanson, 75, of Wren Road, Sidcup, was convicted at Woolwich Crown Court on 7 July 2026 and sentenced on 28 August to 25 years’ imprisonment on 15 counts, including four of rape. Swanson founded the Taoist Arts Organisation in 1995 and ran children’s classes from a church hall in Beckenham in the early 2000s, taking children on residential trips. His victim, a girl in her early teens at the time, came forward in February 2022.

The Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of appealing publicly for further victim-survivors. DC Leonora Simpson: “Based on the gravity of Swanson’s offending, we believe he may have other victims who have yet to come forward.” Anyone with information is asked to contact police on 101, quoting CAD 1652/26AUG26, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

Port Orange, Florida: the warning that was not acted on

This is the case school owners should read twice, because the operational failure is documented and it is not the coach’s.

Estevan Gabriel Martinez-Garcia, 33, a former coach at Bully Me Now Jiujitsu in Port Orange, was arrested in Albuquerque in September 2026 on four Florida charges, including sexual battery by an offender aged 24 or over on a victim aged 16 or 17. Port Orange Police were notified in July 2026; the alleged conduct is said to run from spring 2025 to spring 2026. He remains presumed innocent and the allegations are untested.

The part that belongs in a trade journal: gym owner Victor Ezeir told WFTV he had been warned by several people over roughly ten months about the coach’s interactions with the teenager, and acknowledged that he ignored those warnings. He says he later filed a report; gym members have publicly disputed that account.

Ten months of warnings. That is not a screening failure — no background check catches a first offence. It is a complaint-handling failure, and it is the single most common point at which a school’s safeguarding actually breaks.

Gyeonggi Province, South Korea: seven years, upheld

On 11 September 2026 the Suwon High Court upheld a seven-year sentence against a taekwondo instructor, anonymised in Korean reporting, for offences against a 12-year-old student at an academy in Pyeongtaek between June and August 2025, including producing sexual exploitation material. The court also imposed 80 hours of treatment and a ten-year ban on employment in child-related institutions. The defendant has appealed to the Supreme Court of Korea, so the sentence is not final.

Now the industry problem

SafeSport does not cover you

The U.S. Center for SafeSport received about 9,700 reports of abuse and misconduct in 2025, roughly 20% up year on year, and has delivered more than nine million trainings since 2017. It is a serious, well-resourced body.

Its authority runs to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Movement. USA Taekwondo, USA Karate and USA Judo are inside it. A commercial karate school, an independent BJJ academy, a Muay Thai gym, a kung fu school and any non-Olympic art are not. There is no equivalent body with jurisdiction over them, no central disciplinary database they are checked against, and no mechanism that stops an instructor banned by one school from opening another one across town.

That is the structural fact underneath every one of these cases, and almost nobody in this industry says it out loud.

State law is arriving, and it may not reach you either

Florida is the most instructive example. Chapter 2026-114, Laws of Florida, amending Fla. Stat. § 943.0438, expands the definition of “athletic coach” and requires Level 2 fingerprint-based FDLE and FBI screening for coaches, with records retained at least five years.

Read the trigger carefully. The statute attaches to entities that organise, operate or coordinate youth athletic teams, and to coaches authorised by an independent sanctioning authority. A standalone BJJ academy running classes rather than teams, unaffiliated to any sanctioning body, may fall outside it altogether. The Port Orange case sits squarely in that gap.

Colorado’s Safer Youth Sports Act took effect on 1 July 2025 and goes further on process, requiring prohibited-conduct policies, mandatory reporting frameworks and annual abuse-prevention training. Several other states have screening legislation of varying reach. None of it adds up to national coverage of commercial martial arts schools.

England has made reporting a legal duty

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 introduces a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse for those in regulated activity with children in England. The British Judo Association issued member guidance in June 2026 that is worth reading whatever art you teach, and it contains the point most people get wrong: the duty is personal. A coach who receives a disclosure cannot assume someone else will act on it. Failing to report is not itself a criminal offence — government declined to criminalise it, fearing it would deter grassroots volunteering — but it triggers a DBS referral that can bar a person from child-facing work for life. Obstructing or discouraging someone else’s report is a criminal offence.

England also has the Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts, a voluntary certification scheme developed by Sport England with governing bodies, the NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit and the Ann Craft Trust. It is free to apply for. We could not establish a current enrolment figure — see the sources note below.

Your insurer is already regulating you

This is the part most owners have not read, and it has direct financial consequences.

In the martial arts liability programme published by Sadler & Company for the 2026–27 policy period, abuse, molestation and exploitation are excluded from base general liability cover. You do not have it unless you have separately reported the exposure, been underwritten, been approved and paid for it.

Two buy-back options are offered, neither available standalone. The headline one is $1,000,000 per perpetrator and $1,000,000 aggregate — and it sits inside the general aggregate rather than on top of it. In plain terms: a single abuse claim can consume the entire liability tower that also has to answer for every torn ACL and slip in the lobby. The cheaper option, at a flat $100, is $100,000 defence-cost reimbursement only.

And to get any of it, you answer a questionnaire that asks whether you screen applicants for violence and sexual offence convictions, whether you use third-party background checks with a rejection protocol, and whether you maintain written abuse-prevention procedures covering indicators, law-enforcement reporting, staff training, visibility of one-on-one instruction, facility access control and appropriate-contact policies.

Those are safeguarding standards. They are being enforced by underwriters because nobody else has jurisdiction.

What a professionally run school should have in place

None of this is exotic, and none of it requires a governing body’s permission.

1. Screening with a written rejection protocol. Background checks on every adult with access to children, rerun on a schedule, with a documented rule for what disqualifies. A check you never act on is a filing exercise.
2. Observable instruction as the default. Glass, open doors, cameras in the training space, parents welcome to watch. The insurer’s questionnaire asks about this specifically.
3. A private-lesson rule. Never one adult alone with one child behind a closed door. Second adult present or the door open and the space visible.
4. Communication rules. No instructor-to-minor direct texting or private social media messaging. Parents copied, school-owned channels only.
5. Transport and changing areas. No instructor driving a child alone. No adult in a changing area with children. Phones out of changing areas entirely — a Yongin gym head was sentenced this year over cameras in a changing room.
6. A written complaint procedure with a named recipient and a clock. This is the Port Orange lesson. Warnings arrive informally, from parents and students, and they arrive early. Write down who receives them, what gets recorded, and within how many hours.
7. Immediate suspension on allegation. Removal from contact with children pending outcome, framed in your staff contracts as neutral and non-disciplinary so you can actually use it.
8. Know your mandatory reporting duty in your own state or country, and train every instructor on it annually.
9. Document everything. Training completion, checks, complaints, actions taken. In litigation, an undocumented good decision looks identical to negligence.

NAPMA has published a martial-arts-specific standard covering this ground — 60 auditable requirements, a physical-contact standard, a model code, a reporting protocol and a parent bill of rights, with a one-page school owner checklist — at napma.com/safe-training-environment. It is free and public.

What a school owner should take from this

The instinct when these stories break is to say it was one bad individual and move on. The recurring pattern across these cases is not the offender. It is the interval — ten months of warnings in Florida, offending across the 2000s in London before a 2022 disclosure, decades of alleged conduct in the Australian case still before the courts.

That interval is where a school either functions or does not, and it is entirely within an owner’s control. Nobody is coming to regulate it. Your underwriter will price it, your community will judge it, and if it fails it will not be a safeguarding problem — it will be the end of the business.

Sources, and what we could not confirm

• London: Metropolitan Police statement, 28 August 2026; Evening Standard, 29 August 2026. The Met describes the offending as “non-recent” rather than “historical”.
• Port Orange: WFTV reporting of 10 September 2026, including the interview in which the gym owner acknowledged ignoring warnings; FOX 35 Orlando; BJJDoc, 12 September 2026, on members disputing the owner’s account. We could not confirm bond, arraignment date, the Volusia County case number, or whether extradition has completed. One outlet dates the arrest 9 September and another 10 September; we have not resolved it and have therefore written “September 2026”.
• South Korea: MoneyToday, Insight and Herald Business, all 11 September 2026. The instructor is not named in Korean reporting and we have not attempted to name him. Reports differ on whether the academy was in Pyeongtaek specifically or Gyeonggi Province generally.
• Queensland, Australia: a separate committal-stage case involving a former karate instructor has been widely referenced this week. We are not reporting its details. The figures circulating do not match the primary reporting we could obtain, the fullest recent account sits behind a paywall we could not lawfully access, and we will not publish charge counts or complainant numbers we cannot verify against a court record. We are seeking confirmation from the Queensland Courts media unit.
• Florida law: Chapter 2026-114, Laws of Florida; Fla. Stat. § 943.0438. The chapter law contains both a 1 January 2026 screening-commencement reference subject to AHCA determination and a 1 July 2026 effective date; owners should confirm the operative compliance date with AHCA. Whether a non-affiliated commercial academy meets the “independent sanctioning authority” definition is our reading of the statute, not a determination by any Florida agency.
• Colorado: Safer Youth Sports Act, SB24-113. Claims circulating in compliance marketing that “30+ states” have such laws are trade-source figures we could not verify against a primary registry, and we have not repeated them.
• England: Crime and Policing Act 2026; British Judo Association safeguarding guidance, 23 June 2026; NSPCC CPSU. On the Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts, Sport England’s last confirmed figure is 700+ clubs across 1,100+ settings — but that page is dated March 2021. A 1,000-club figure circulates without a date we could verify. We have asked Sport England and the NWG Network for a current number.
• Insurance: Sadler & Company martial arts programme documentation for the 1 January 2026 – 28 February 2027 policy period. Terms vary by carrier and by school; read your own policy rather than ours.
• SafeSport: U.S. Center for SafeSport 2025 Annual Report, released 23 June 2026.

Corrections are welcome and will be published with attribution. If you are a school owner who has had to act on an allegation and would be willing to describe what you learned, on the record or not, we would like to hear from you.