Could Background Check Have Prevented Rape?
The question above was asked by CNN, who investigated and incident on the Gulf Coast last month when an oil spill worker was put to work with a background check being done on him.
The oil company that employed the worker along with hundreds of others conducted drug checks on their workers, but not background checks. The 41-year-old employee, who had a criminal record dating back to 1991,and has been a registered sex offender since 1996, offered to give a ride home to a co-worker who wasn’t feeling well. Once at her hotel, he asked to use the bathroom and when he came out, he attacked and raped her.
He was charged with sexual battery and failure to register as a sex offender. He was held under $505,000 bond in Jackson County Mississippi.
It’s easy now to play Monday morning quarterback and question the actions of the oil company. They decided that drug testing was important enough to run to avoid hiring users, but not a background check in order to determine if the potential worker had a past that included violent criminal acts and sexual offenses. The oil company, already dealing with a public relations nightmare and an environmental disaster, now had yet another embarrassing incident to defend.
Background checks are now an accepted part of the hiring process and are quick, and economical to do, making it so easy to avoid problems like those described above. Everyone deserves the safest environment possible in the workplace, and the victim’s exposure to this predator could have been easily prevented.
As the victim was quoted as saying, “If they would have ran the background checks, they wouldn’t have had a man like that working.”
To discuss your background check program, click here, or call 770-426-0547.
