Background Checks

[Adam]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

It makes everyone feel better like many policies implemented. It does not do much of anything else in my opinion.

Peace

Hence my question starting with "other than the warm-fuzzy." Making people feel better isn't enough of a reason to implement a policy that costs money, IMO. I'd say it's actually doing more harm than good if it makes people feel better for no real reason.

And reading the article linked above didn't do anything for me either. Unless someone show me two things, I remain unconvinced:

1. There is a statistical correlation between those who commit such crimes as fraud, theft, "falsities," and even violent crimes with those who commit sexual crimes against minors.

and

2. There is a vulnerability to sports officials in particular, in their capacity as sports officials, that can be at least partly solved by background checks.

I have doubts on both, to be honest.

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by Snaqwells

Hence my question starting with "other than the warm-fuzzy." Making people feel better isn't enough of a reason to implement a policy that costs money, IMO. I'd say it's actually doing more harm than good if it makes people feel better for no real reason.

And reading the article linked above didn't do anything for me either. Unless someone show me two things, I remain unconvinced:

1. There is a statistical correlation between those who commit such crimes as fraud, theft, "falsities," and even violent crimes with those who commit sexual crimes against minors.

and

2. There is a vulnerability to sports officials in particular, in their capacity as sports officials, that can be at least partly solved by background checks.

I have doubts on both, to be honest.

I completely agree in principle. There is really no real reason to have a policy of background checks. But the problem too is that we are in a litigious culture. If anything happens to someone, we have a tendency to blame someone no matter how much they are to really blame. And I bet that if these policies were not in place, the minute someone gets in trouble or an incident happens, a lack of a policy would likely be apart of a lawsuit. That being said, it really does not hurt to have a policy. You get to check information that might be seen as threatening and most people feel good that organizations are doing something about it. But in a perfect world there is no need for any policy. But people are so paranoid of what happens with their children.

I just remember when I was a kid, we had no cell phones, GPS systems and we would be all over the neighborhood with no parental supervision and someone how we were not harmed or killed by some child predator. I am not saying things did not happen to kids of my era, but it was hardly a stranger it was a family member or a friend of the family. But because of the media attention, we have people convinced that there are people lurking in the shadows that you need to be the most concerned with.

Peace

[zm1283]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

I just remember when I was a kid, we had no cell phones, GPS systems and we would be all over the neighborhood with no parental supervision and someone how we were not harmed or killed by some child predator. I am not saying things did not happen to kids of my era, but it was hardly a stranger it was a family member or a friend of the family. But because of the media attention, we have people convinced that there are people lurking in the shadows that you need to be the most concerned with.

Peace

It still is. You're much more likely to be victimized by someone you already know and not by some random predator. (i.e. those awful sports officials in this case )

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by zm1283

It still is. You're much more likely to be victimized by someone you already know and not by some random predator. (i.e. those awful sports officials in this case )

I am very aware of that. But I was a kid when the Atlanta inner-city were missing and you would hear of kids that were missing across the country and found in some remote place dead. Many of these laws and values started to come out of the 80s to the 90s. It started to become or seem like an epidemic and then we felt that every kid needed to be watched at all times. I even remember when there was this big push to teach us (when I was a kid) to not talk to strangers and only talk to people we knew. Then it became obvious that the "strangers" were the uncle or aunt or the good family friend.

Peace

[zm1283]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

I am very aware of that. But I was a kid when the Atlanta inner-city were missing and you would hear of kids that were missing across the country and found in some remote place dead. Many of these laws and values started to come out of the 80s to the 90s. It started to become or seem like an epidemic and then we felt that every kid needed to be watched at all times. I even remember when there was this big push to teach us (when I was a kid) to not talk to strangers and only talk to people we knew. Then it became obvious that the "strangers" were the uncle or aunt or the good family friend.

Peace

Gotcha. We're on the same page here. I knew you knew that, I was just pointing it out.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by zm1283

You're much more likely to be victimized by someone you already know and not by some random predator.

Violent crimes against children have declined steadily over the past generation. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that 81 out of every 1,000 children between the ages of 12 and 15 were victims of violent crime in 1973, compared with 44 out of 1,000 in 2005.

The worst of those crimes - kidnappings, rapes and murders - are being committed not by strangers hunting innocents but by family members, neighbors or trusted adults the family knows.

Kidnappings by complete strangers, while terrifyingly sinister, are fairly rare events, representing only about one in every 2,900 abduction cases.

The most recent survey of kidnapping data conducted in 2002 for the U.S. Justice Department revealed that of the roughly 261,000 children who are abducted each year, the vast majority (203,900) are taken by a family member - often in a custody dispute - and just 90 to 115 are victims of kidnappings by complete strangers.

The idea of a child being dragged off to be tortured, raped and murdered by a stranger is so terrifying and so well reported in the news media that parents, educators, even law enforcement officers and politicians, have accepted as fact that stranger abductions are more commonplace than they actually are.

"Those are the ones that capture the public's imagination, and they should because they're awful" says Jim Beasley, supervisory special agent for the FBI and a specialist in crimes against children. "But because they hear the story told over and over, people tend to forget that this is the same incident."