Verity journal

Background Screening

If sexual predators were readily distinguishable by outward appearance alone, we would instantly swoop down at the opportunity to save our children from them. The alarming fact is, sexual offenders come disguised as some of the most trustworthy people. As much as we’d like to rely on intuition, it simply isn’t enough to keep our precious ones safe. 

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you should lay off the guesswork and conduct a background screen on that bus driver, teacher, babysitter, or any other person involved in your child’s day-to-day interactions. 

1. Abuse can happen right under your nose

From sexual grooming, to coercion and threats, sexual misconduct is not always immediately identifiable. Furthermore: the vast majority of child sex offenders are known to victims, and use familiarity to manipulate their victims.

As sexual predators do not even spare infants, toddlers, or the differently-abled, victimised children may not even have the ability to communicate the abuse to you. 

A background screen can at least highlight if an individual has had such history of misconduct with minors. Right off the bat, you can make informed choices for the benefit of your children. 

2. We gotta catch em’ all

As public data is already available, why not make use of it? The registry of sexual offenders identifies around 3000 child sex offenders with roughly 4-5% of them being repeat offenders. 

With information like this, you can proactively protect your child from those with a history of harming children, repeatedly or not. No guessing needed. 

We too can play our part. We can all up our vigilance and be bold about reporting known incidents of abuse. The more predators that are tagged and identified, the better the database. It’s reliability increases, and we can all feel more confident turning to it to prevent sex crimes. 

3. You are letting them know not to mess with you

The move to allow the public access to information pertaining to child sexual crimes was received with much appreciation. Recent reports from the ministry however, show that only 68 so far, capitalised on this free service to do background checks.

This dismal figures suggest that background checks is still not a natural course of action for Malaysians despite information being accessible. Or, awareness is still very low and most opt to just trust the people handling their children. 

When you take that first step to conduct a background check on the people caring for your child, you send out a clear message that lines are not to be crossed. At the very least, you can stop the ill-intentioned in their tracks out of fear of being caught and blacklisted on the registry. 

While it is not possible to tell a sex offender from just looking at them, there are preventive measures to help us feel more assured. 

To find out how you can leverage background screening, visit https://www.verityintel.com/ for more information. Follow our blog for similar topics!

At Verity Intelligence, our entire process complies with the Malaysian Personal Data Protection Act as we are very serious about regulatory compliance and respecting the privacy of individuals. The information we obtain, screen or verify from is also publicly and legally available.

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