Need of the hour

Criminal background check in India

As an educator and a counselor, I have worked with students of different ages in India and in the United States. Before starting my internship at a school in the state of Oregon (US) and in order to be able to work with minors, one of the mandatory requirements was to pass a criminal background check.

What is a criminal background check?

In the US, the Federal law requires each State to have policies to protect health and safety of the children. In Oregon, I had to provide details such as name, passport information, my residence addresses for the last 5 years, etc along with my fingerprints and a fee for verification of my details. Once you provide this information, the organization runs a background check with different data registries. This requirement is mandatory for anyone working with vulnerable population including children in any capacity. That is, everyone including citizens and noncitizens,teachers, helpers, social workers, bus conductors, cooks, counselors, nurse, etc. have to provide their personal details and fingerprints, and have their antecedents verified.Indeed, this is a prime example of a structural level preventative step. In the field of Public Health it is called an upstream approach.

What is an upstream approach?

Imagine you are standing at a river and see someone drowning. You could try to save that person the first time. However, you see a second person drowning, and then a third person drowning. Each time you see someone drowning you try to save them. If you stop there, what you are doing is called a downstream approach. However, if after sometime you wonder what is causing all these people to fall in the river. Perhaps, you go up and investigate, with the intention of preventing all these people falling in. If you do that, then you are following an upstream approach.

As you might imagine, the upstream or preventive approach is often better suited for problems in the society, and more than that, it shows commitment on the part of the society to ensure that its members do not come to harm. That is, when the states checks everyone’s background before letting them work or volunteer near a vulnerable person such as a minor, a disabled person or an elderly, it shows the commitment towards their safety. It shows us that everyone in the country – the policy makers, the legal advocates, the teachers, the parents and the community – cares for those who work and come in contact with them.

When I learned first about this process, I felt a need for such a process in our country, especially for our schools. It may have been impossible before for a country of our size, however, with the government completing the Aadhar Card, a process such as background check can be implemented relatively easily. We need a database such that if a person has a problematic record such as crimes against children, or any other activity that may be considered unsafe for children then they do not get to come near our children. Every person from a bus conductor to a principal, a 19 year old volunteer to a 70 year old grandfather; if he or she wants to work or volunteer or care for our children they must go through this background check.

At this stage I am not sure what would be the cost to introduce the checks but as we know prevention is always better. Today in news we often hear about little children being molested, assaulted, trafficked or even murdered, which — I believe — shows the necessity of such a process. Unfortunately, our current system is built to act after the event has already occurred, which is insufficient. Some of these events have caused massive anger and uproar among the public only after the harm is already done to that individual or that family. Examples of these downstream approaches are teaching our children to report if anything happens to them or their friends, involvement of police and media, legal battles. What we want to build now is a system where we prevent the event from occurring. Asking for background check will limit our children from falling into such traps.

It may be argued that, such an approach may not result in the complete prevention of all child-related crimes. However, that is not a reason to reject this approach out of hand. One may further argue that statistics show that most assaulters or perpetrators of crimes against children are known to the victims. Hence, a background check of strangers is of little use. Indeed, there is merit to this argument. This is why everyone, — including all bus/van/auto uncles who drop our kids to schools and classes; the teachers in schools and tuition classes, the staff members and volunteers — has to come under this scanner.

The point is that, we have the technology and the data in our country to include this process that will create a safety net for our little ones. Last but not the least, the background check process is being adopted by several countries across the world. The US uses this for many other purposes where in Australia a law was created to protect the vulnerable population called- “Working with Vulnerable People (Background Checking) Act 2011” that is more close to what we would like to propose for India. I am interested in knowing your opinion about this topic. If you agree or disagree with me please comment below. We would like to initiate a debate to understand the pros and cons of such process and thereby provide suggestions to the policy makers of our country. Your few minutes and a few words will help us create a process to help our children.

The following links can provide further information on the concept of background checks:

Originally published at poise7

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