Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Criminal Back ground checks

[Christy Collins (ccollins]

I am not currently living in co-housing, but here's my 2 cents on the 
pedophile issue based on the discussions I've seen on this list and on 
some parenting bulletin boards.

Many states specifically have registers for sexual offenders and you 
could use these lists rather than a full fledged criminal background 
check.  Some folks have said that these lists are not well maintained 
and that the offenders are not always kept track of.

The bigger point though that I want to make is that you shouldn't have 
a false sense of security because you have had a criminal background 
check.  All children should be educated about personal boundaries.  
They should feel confident in communicating with their parents about 
any topic without shame or fear.  These are essentially parenting 
issues that shouldn't be abandoned even in the midst of a community.  
Pedophiles are often not caught.  We hear in the headlines about the 
creepy neighbor that abducted and murdered a child, but the far more 
common situation is that it is a beloved relative or family friend  
that molests a child.  Criminal background checks will rarely help to 
prevent this more common tragedy.

My vote would be to abandon the background checks and instead focus 
energy and resources toward education about prevention within the 
community.

-Christy




On Saturday, February 28, 2004, at 09:12 PM, Juva wrote:

> I am hoping I could gather some information about what other 
> communities do
> about criminal background checks.  I tried to do a search and found 
> that
> there had been a discussion but couldn't get the pages to come up.  We 
> have
> been getting them, but are not completely comfortable with this.  It 
> had
> felt like having this information would be good.  The questions that 
> are
> coming up are.....what do we do with this information?  Who gets the
> information?  We pretty much have said that this isn't to screen out 
> people
> but to know...except pedophiles.....that seems to be one that people 
> do what
> to keep out.  Thoughts, history, if your community does collect this
> information how do you handle it?
> Juva, CoHo in Corvallis, Oregon (just had our first day of our site 
> planning
> workshop!  YEAH)
>
>
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