Background Checks

[Camron Rust]

Originally Posted by Berkut

Not really - the fact that he is a human being who lives in a society puts him in place to befriend kids. He could have walked into the gym and sat down next to some kid and befriended him, or it is even likely that he is already friends with lots of kids, like his relatives.

No....officiating game gives an official acess that a fan wouldn't have had. They have repeated contacts with the same kids in a trusting environment that allows the offender to develop a trust with the child.

Originally Posted by Berkut

Barn door, except this barn has no sides, roof, or door for that matter.

So, since you can't close all access, don't bother with any...particularly the most likely or the most easily addressed?

Originally Posted by Berkut

Officiating does not provide anyone with any special access to kids - that is the danger, not the fact that you are there and kids are there - that happens everytime I walk into my local grocery store.

Sure it does. Positions of authority, even if in limited venues, give access that the random person does not have.

Originally Posted by Berkut

Emotive nonsense. Of course once is too much - but that doesn't mean that any all imposition on others (99.999% of whom are perfectly innocent) is justified as long as it can stop one single instance of a crime being committed.

Citation please? You might be suprised to find that he number of offenders is a bit higher than 0.001%.

Originally Posted by Berkut

That same logic can (and has) been used to justify any kind of restriction of liberty or invasion of privacy. The reality is that bad things will happen. We don't want to live in a police state (and in fact most police states still ahve bad things happening anyway - generally much MORE bad things), so we have presumably decided that there should be some kind of balancing mechanism for how we restrict the innocent majority in order to protect ourselves from the criminal minority.

That balancing mechanism involves some sort of *objective* measure of risk weighed against the imposition the "fix" imposes on everyone else, and the effectiveness of the fix. So far, nobody has been able to EVER provide a single piece of data to measure the risk of NOT doing background checks on officials, or shown how the fix will reduce that risk.

And this should be easy to find, if in fact there is a problem. People have been officiating without background checks for decades - surely if this is a problem, there ought to be lots of data about it, right? Lots of police reports of officials who abuse their position to molest kids?

Right?

Do you not think that the whole idea of a background check was started by having kids molested only to find out that the teacher/coach/referee had a record of the same behavior elsewhere that would have been easily discovered with a simple background check?