Protecting Kids with Lie Detectors
By Brianne Burr, Marketing –
Better laws are needed to protect minors in the workplace. Lie detectors could help improve the situation.
Children and minors should be protected by law. There are current laws designed to protect children, such as child labor laws prohibiting work demands for certain ages or hours of work. But there are ways that kids are directly impacted by laws that do not protect them, and the damage can be significant.
One of these concerns is the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA), which currently prohibits employers from requiring employees or prospective employees to take a lie detector test, from using the results of such a test, and from taking any sort of action against an employee who will not submit to a lie detector test.
On one hand, this is a good law for protecting employee privacy and rights. However, when employees regularly work with children and their actions are harming those children, it becomes a different issue entirely.
There are societal issues today that were not as ever-present as they were in 1988 when the EPPA was passed. Now, there is a growing trend in serious issues with employee-child relations. Employees at a number of U.S. theme parks have been discovered for having illicit sexual relations with children they met in their line of work.
Should employees with access to children who have tendencies toward sexual or physical assault be permitted to work directly with kids? I believe that kids should be protected against such individuals and kept safe.
Lie Detectors and Children
Due to these changing trends in society, laws must be more protective of children. In an effort to achieve this, U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross of Florida is proposing new legislation to amend the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988. Ross’ proposition is to allow businesses that specifically “cater to children” to use lie detectors to screen potential employees as a means of protecting children.
The Protecting Our Children Act would still protect the prospective employee by granting them reasonable notice of the test and the “right to consult with legal counsel or an employee representative before each phase of the test.”
At Converus, we stand behind Rep. Ross for his actions. Our goal is to reduce corruption, fraud, theft and deceit in the world through the use of lie detection technology known as EyeDetect™. Protecting children from deceptive and untrustworthy employees is a worthy cause.
