UNITED STATES
OpEd News
By
Rev. Dan Vojir
Another Institution Based On Trust Is Tarnished. Will The “New And Improved” Boy Scouts Weather The Scandal?
(Reuters) – The Boy Scouts of America could face a wave of bad publicity as decades of records of confirmed or alleged child molesters within the U.S. organization are expected to be released in coming weeks.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reported the organization failed to report allegations of sex abuse of scouts by adult leaders and volunteers to police in hundreds of cases from 1970 to 1991. In some cases, the Boy Scouts helped the accused “cover their tracks,” the paper said.
Over Or Covert: What’s In A Cover-up?
Paul Mones, one of the attorneys in a landmark case of molestation* stated that “In the Catholic Church there were overt cover-ups, and I don’t think you see a lot of that here with the Boy Scouts.” But what would make the cover-ups more overt? Mones didn’t speculate. (Apparently, in the law, there are varying degrees of cover-up.) Matter of administration and hierarchy – or lack of them – were part of the problem from 1971 to 1991: vetting and regulations were not strictly enforced. The “Perversion Files” were kept since 1919, but kept out of the public eye … until now. Over 400 cases were not reported. Some of those cases involved offenders who went on to abuse as many as 20 more boys over the years.
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