If you're a parent who signed up your child for a school sport or youth league, you probably got word that someone has done a criminal background check on any adults involved with the team in question. I don't want to freak you out, but that background check may be doing almost nothing to keep sexual offenders and child abusers away from your child.
Now that I have your attention, I can assure you that there is an extremely strong chance that the people coaching your children have no bad intentions. But that background check you hear about likely isn't responsible because it scope is limited, and because it only can catch people who already are convicted criminals. As a parent, you don't have worry every moment that a bad person is going to attack your children, but you should listen to any little voice inside that tells you something doesn't seem right.
The limits of background checks are very apparent when you look at new rules Little League International has put in place for the 2019 season to make those checks more expansive.
Little League has instituted a rule that requires every league to submit every coach to a national background check conducted by a vendor. The first difference between Little League and many other leagues is that the check is actually national. In most cases, background checks are through state police agencies and cover only local or in-state convictions. (Assuming they're done: only nine states require background checks for non-school activities.) However, like most leagues, Little League's background check focuses on searching databases for crimes against children.
For Little League, if an individual appears on the National Sex Offender Registry, the league must immediately notify the organization's security director before the individual can participate. Part of the reason for this is that Little League acknowledges that its system could end up returning false positives, in part because of limits in what information states actually run to check backgrounds.
This is from a sample letter Little League suggests leagues send about the background-check process:
As part of the verification process, we provide information from various government agencies and sex offender registries. In most states, we alert Little League only when a criminal record matches at least two of a person’s personal identifiers, such as name and date of birth, or name and Social Security number.
However, sex offender registries from several states list offenders by name and do not provide sufficient personal identifiers to help differentiate between two people with the same name. Little League is aware of the fact that these states do not provide any other personal identifiers and still requires JDP [Little League's background check vendor] to report any match of an applicant’s name if it is associated with a criminal record, even when no other information is made available by government officials.
Please find the report that was provided to Little League attached for your review. Little League is aware this record may not be yours, and they are committed to investigating the situation before approving or denying your application or concluding that the record belongs to you. Please be assured this information is confidential and will not be provided to anyone other than Little League.
The other problem, and it's nothing that Little League or any other organization can do anything about in advance, is that a name doesn't get rejected unless someone is convicted of a crime. As we know from the Larry Nassar case, someone can abuse scores of children for years before getting charged with anything. As we also know from the Larry Nassar case, organizations can keep their heads in the sand or protect an abuser even once complaints begin.
Only a few days before I write this, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles just paid out its largest sex-abuse settlement ever to a single person, $8 million to a woman who, as a girl, was abused by the athletic director and volleyball coach at an all-girls Catholic high school, which was accused of ignoring previous warnings about his behavior. (He was convicted of charges related to this, so he should appear in background checks.) Also, you can search online anytime for coaches accused of, or convicted of, sexually abusing children and get back plenty of results.
Little League and many other organizations are sincerely trying to protect children, and doing what they can with the resources they can. Every league should do some sort of background check, if for no other reason than to get the most obvious threats out of the way. However, parents and league officials, while they don't have to assume everyone is an abuser until proven otherwise, do have to keep their eyes open to inappropriate behavior, be ready to report it, and be ready to take action -- no matter how connected the subject of concern.
