When kids’ safety wins over privacy
If fingerprinting volunteers is necessary, let’s be polite about it
It starts with an email informing you that the police want to see you. They need to take your fingerprints and check if you’re a sex offender.
How would you feel about such a request?
It certainly didn’t make my day. I’m not a sex offender, so I have nothing to hide. I’ve never been arrested for anything, let alone convicted.
Nonetheless, I was on the police list. I had volunteered to coach my son’s hockey team, and when a routine police check was done on my name, I shared a birth date with a known sex offender.
Sex offenders try to change their identities, so organizations must make sure their volunteers are not devious, name-changing pedophiles. Hence my fingerprints were required to clear me.
The thought of it seemed intrusive, humiliating even. Was it really necessary to subject me and other honest volunteers to fingerprinting, something that should only happen to real criminals?
Right now, with a new school year, with new hockey and football seasons and with various youth groups getting into full swing again, hundreds of Edmonton men will face this same request for fingerprints. I doubt any of them are sex offenders with secret identities, but there’s always that remote possibility.
Of course, we all know why this mass fingerprinting is happening. There have been some cases of children sexually abused by youth leaders and coaches, most infamously the molestation of former NHLers Sheldon Kennedy and Theo Fleury by their major junior hockey coach Graham James in the 1980s. As a result, parents are worried. Coaches, youth leaders and parent volunteers at some city schools are now regularly screened with police checks and, in recent years, followup electronic fingerprinting.
Alberta is a hot spot for these checks, reports the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. There are 160,000 police checks done each year in the province, 37 per cent by employers, 22 per cent by volunteer organizations.
Of course, most people see this screening as reasonable because it helps safeguard children. As Anne Cote, a privacy lawyer for Field Law, says: “While it may be timeconsuming and at times a cumbersome process, I would expect that many people would consider it to be reasonable to require volunteers working directly with minors to undergo some form of criminal record screening.”
When I asked folks on Twitter, the vast majority approved, including Fleury himself, who said of the police checks: “There’s a pedophile in every kids program in the country. Needs to happen.”
And Steve Connors: “To protect our children, it should not be seen as an invasion. It is voluntary. If a coach objects, they don’t coach, simple as that.”
“A must,” said Dan Dromarsky. “If you have nothing to hide you should have no problem with them. … It’s a proactive safety measure. A lot better then a reactive jail term and scarred kid.”
Others were more grudging in their acceptance. Said TSN hockey analyst Bob McKenzie, author of Hockey Dad: True Confessions of a (Crazy) Hockey Parent: “Necessary evil to prevent real evil, I suppose. I was never fingerprinted but police check was standard operating procedure.”
“As a minor football coach I’ve done it every year for years,” said Robb Angus. “I understand it but at the end of the day, does it accomplish that much? … It’s an imperfect process which only weeds out those who have been caught. It’s an irritating measure but it’s the best we have.”
And John Hozack asked, “When did (Graham) James have a criminal record? This would never have stopped him.”
Hozack raises a good point. James coached major junior hockey until 1996 and wasn’t convicted until 1997. Having this police check might well give parents a false sense of security that all the pedophiles have been weeded out.
With this in mind, the Volunteer Alberta organization encourages member organizations to take other steps to check out volunteers, such as having them get references and do interviews.
In the end, I got fingerprinted and had a great year coaching.
This year, my local hockey body had a day where all the coaches filled out their police forms at once, cutting down on the hassle for everyone.
In the future, the best practice might be to simply have the police fingerprint everyone right then as well. This would cut out that unwelcome, timeconsuming trip to the police station. If we’re going to treat volunteers like criminals, we should be careful and polite about it.