Online screening tools help churches to unmask pedophiles

Some insurance companies are pushing churches to do better screening.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A background investigation on the volunteer at the Jackson, Miss., Boys & amp; Girls Club turned up an ugly past: a prison record for molesting a child.
The club fired the man as part of a new policy of criminal records checks that employs a for-pay Web site to review records from courts, motor vehicle bureaus and credit agencies.
"It allowed us to find this guy before he could do anything," said Billy Redd, the club's president, who did not disclose the man's name for privacy reasons. "We're not going to have anyone here with a criminal background."
With pedophile scandals rocking churches and youth groups across the United States, background searches are becoming common -- sometimes mandatory -- for clergy, employees and adult volunteers who work with children.
New Internet-based screening tools, like those provided by data vendors ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, make it quick and cheap to troll a person's history. The searches often return results in minutes, finding crimes associated with 2 percent to 10 percent of those screened -- about the same level as society at large.
Catholic Church requirement
In November, for example, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops began requiring background clearance for anyone who deals with children. Some of the pressure to screen backgrounds stems from insurance companies that sell policies to churches and youth groups -- and who pay their sex-abuse claims.
"We do recommend they screen," said Rick Schaber, spokesman for Church Mutual Insurance Co., in Merrill, Wis. "It uncovers people you don't want to have in certain parts of your organization."
But critics say overreliance on such security screening would be a mistake because most pedophiles aren't burdened by public criminal records.
"It takes a lot to come to the attention of law enforcement. The typical sex offender doesn't get caught on first victim," said Dr. Karen Lawson, a clinical psychologist who treats sex offenders at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Despite hundreds of people fired or blocked from church and volunteer jobs in the past year, Church Mutual hasn't seen a drop in claims over child molesting, Schaber said.
Claims have been steady at five per week since the mid-1980s, when the company began selling sex abuse coverage to its 84,000 U.S. houses of worship, he said.
Experts such as Lawson say background checks would be more effective if bolstered by reference checks and policies that prevent adults from working alone with individual children. Most organizations reported implementing such standards.
Busy service
Suburban Atlanta-based ChoicePoint has checked records of about 60,000 pastors, lay workers and volunteers so far this year, said Baxter Gillespie, an assistant vice president who oversees ChoicePoint's workplace screening division. Some of those checks were through a custom Web portal built for the Catholic Church.
Overall, some 2 percent of searches have turned up felonies, drunken driving or sex offenses, Gillespie said, compared with 5 percent to 7 percent in background checks among small businesses.
Kroll Background America, a division of private security company Kroll Inc., said 20 percent of its 3,000 yearly background checks for churches and youth groups turned up records of arrests or convictions. Some 8 percent had convictions, Kroll said.
Six percent of those screened by LexisNexis' PeopleWise -- including businesses not affiliated with church or children -- turned up criminal backgrounds, the company said.
Such commercial data companies have amassed troves of information on private Americans, buying whole databases from credit bureaus, courthouses, marketing firms and myriad government agencies.
Maintaining vigilance
In Jackson, Miss., Redd said the club turned away "several dozen" would-be volunteers or employees whose backgrounds included charges ranging from drug possession to assault.
"Drugs seem to be so prevalent these days. Sometimes it's tempting to say, 'Well, that was five or 10 years ago,"' Redd said. "But if you've got a criminal record, we don't want you around here."
Half the 3,300 Boys & amp; Girls Clubs in the United States have registered to use ChoicePoint's screening site, and the club is now pursuing FBI fingerprint checks in a pilot program recently signed into law.
If a pedophile passes a church background check and still molests a child, the fact that a screening was done can protect the church from lawsuits based on negligence, said James Cobble, executive director of Christian Ministry Resources.
"The motivation for doing these is driven more by legal than safety concerns," said Cobble, whose group operates ScreenChurchStaff.com, a ChoicePoint-affiliated site. "The leaders want a safe environment. But it's taken the legal environment to motivate them."