GEORGIA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Alan Judd
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATHENS —
Who could have been a more upstanding citizen than Ernest Boland?
Businessman. Rotarian. Adviser to local government officials. Full colonel in the Army Reserve. And, for 25 years, the leader of three separate Boy Scout troops.
“He helped a lot of boys start on the right path in life,” an admirer wrote in nominating Boland as Athens’ citizen of the century.
But behind the façade of uniforms and civic engagement, Boland seemed to harbor dark secrets. Across Athens, scouts and other boys quietly unburdened their shame: Boland, they told their parents, was not the trusted mentor they perceived him as, but a child molester, one who forced them to repeatedly perform sex acts with him.
These secrets finally were revealed last month through the release of long-confidential files that detailed accusations of sexual abuse by scoutmasters nationwide. Boland’s file claims he molested a dozen or more scouts and other boys between the 1950s and the 1970s. Even when some of the boys told, the file shows, prominent adults in Athens kept the matter quiet, tacitly giving Boland the chance to continue abusing boys under his authority.
The way scout officials, leaders of his church and others handled the allegations against Boland reflects the ethos of an earlier era, before such iconic institutions as the Roman Catholic Church and Penn State’s football program were forced to deal with scandals involving the sexual abuse of children. Laws did not mandate reporting suspicions of abuse to authorities, as they do now, and a common approach was to deal with child molesters, especially those who enjoyed a degree of prominence in their communities, behind the scenes.
“In those days, this was a no-no in terms of publicizing it,” said the Rev. James Griffith, who as Boland’s pastor in the mid-1970s heard reports of his sexual transgressions. “It was suspected, but there was not much done about it.”
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