The Boy Scouts of America declaring bankruptcy – as part of an effort to spread their dwindling wealth among tens of thousands of still-uncompensated sex abuse victims – but staying operational is both craven and irresponsible.
While the Scouts may be slamming on the fiscal brakes with what national chair Jim Turley is carefully referring to as a “voluntary financial restructuring,” the organization is still inexplicably signing up kids, as if a sex abuse scandal that one attorney suggested could be bigger than the one facing the Roman Catholic Church was not unfolding just beneath the surface.
While a good portion of the public knows what’s going on, there’s a very real risk that a parent signing their child up for scouting hasn’t heard of the scandal, or isn’t aware of its size and scale. Indeed, the number of victims isn’t even known yet – testimony last April merely showed that the BSA knew about 7,800 former leaders who had sexually abused over 12,000 kids. Visiting Scouting.org, one comes away none the wiser that the organization is even having financial troubles, let alone wrestling with the guilt of covering up for predators for decades, unless one should chance to click over to the Newsroom – and even then, official press releases won’t touch the subject of number of victims or name names.
Pretending that the recent rise in predator complaints has been merely due to better pedophile-detection methods is wildly disingenuous and ignores how other child-centered organizations have managed to operate without scandal of this magnitude.
“Parents should be told the moment they’re approached about signing their child up” that the Scouts are dealing with the fallout from a sex abuse scandal that could dwarf the [Catholic] church’s, comedian Lee Camp told RT on Tuesday.
“That way they can make an informed decision. They can think to themselves, ‘On one hand my boy may be molested like thousands of boys have. On the other hand… he could learn how to whittle…Hmm, tough call.’”
Long considered synonymous with religiosity and good moral character, the Scouts have recently made changes to their organization, to bring it more in line with modern times – revoking its ban on homosexuals in 2014 and letting girls join as of 2017.
“Acting like the higher-ups didn’t know this was going on is simply laughable,” Camp continued, suggesting “It’s like Lance Armstrong claiming he didn’t know why he kept winning every Tour de France.”
If the Boy Scouts is not going to be shut down, then the absolute least they can do is inform every single parent about the truth.
It’s not clear what message the Scouts are trying to send by staying operational while they sort out their financial issues and promise vague “compensation” via a proposed trust that will deny tens of thousands of victims of their day in court. One possibility is that the Scouts are tacitly acknowledging they protected the predators in their midst instead of the youth in their care – but insisting, now that “BSA’s youth safety measures are the strongest and most effective policies” in any such organization, that it can never happen again.
In the other, they’re admitting they have no way to tell the difference between a predator and an ordinary adult, and pointing to the safety measures they have in place as if to say “we know our line of work attracts pedophiles, but we’ve made it so they can’t be alone with your kid – assuming they follow the rules, of course.” Either way, it doesn’t look good for the Scouts.
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