The fingerprinting and background check requirement for Maine’s school employees raises important questions for educational policy and crime control. As a criminologist who has written and taught extensively about crime and crime policy, I’d like to explain why I believe this requirement should be repealed.

The requirement has good intentions, as do many crime control policies.

Its goal is to help protect our state, and specifically our schoolchildren, from crimes teachers and other school personnel may commit. The obvious crime on everyone’s mind is sexual abuse.

Some policies may have good intentions but still be wrongheaded. They may stem from mistaken beliefs about the reasons for and nature of a social problem, and their implementation may do much more harm than good. The fingerprint and background check requirement is one of these policies.

Certainly the sexual abuse of children is a serious social problem. Although accurate estimates are hard to come by for this type of crime, the best evidence indicates that about 25 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys nationwide are sexually abused. Our society should undertake reasonable measures to reduce sexual abuse and to deal with the sex offenders among us.

But is the fingerprint and background check requirement a reasonable measure? I think not. My basic reason for this conclusion is simple: Teachers and other school employees commit only a very, very tiny proportion of all sexual abuse of children. They are not the problem. Instead, most sexually abused children are victimized by a father, stepfather, mother’s boyfriend, or other male relative. The remainder are abused by neighbors and other family acquaintances, and occasionally by strangers. When a teacher or other school employee does abuse a child, it gets a lot of publicity and thus concerns us.

But if we want to protect our children we should not be worried about our teachers and other school employees; they are not the problem. Instead we should be worried about our children’s fathers, stepfathers, mother’s boyfriends and other male relatives, acquaintances and neighbors.

Are we going to try to do massive fingerprinting and background checks on all these people? Obviously not. To do so sounds like overkill, a presumption of guilt without evidence, a violation of civil liberties, even an act of a police state. Some members of the clergy have molested children. Should we thus fingerprint and do background checks on all members of the clergy? Of course not: the sins of a very few should not tarnish the vast, vast majority who do good works and serve their congregations and their children well.

Then why fingerprint and do background checks on all our teachers and other school personnel? Because they’re easy targets? Because they abuse our children? To repeat, they are not the problem. This policy is just as much overkill, a presumption of guilt, and a violation of civil liberties as the massive or clergy-limited policies just criticized. The very few bad apples among school employees should not lead us to suspect the vast, vast majority of hardworking and law-abiding school personnel who serve their communities and their children well. By fingerprinting and doing background checks we treat them as possible pedophiles even though they are not the ones sexually abusing our children. By distrusting them we disrespect them, dishonor them, and lower their morale. They deserve better.

Steven E. Barkan is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maine.