PENNSYLVANIA
The Morning Call
By Peter Hall, Of The Morning Call
8:48 p.m. EST, December 12, 2012
A man who claims he was sexually abused by a Chester County scoutmaster — sometimes at a Scout camp in the Poconos — has sued the Boy Scouts of America and the Mormon church.
The suit, filed Wednesday in Philadelphia County Court, alleges that the Scouts knew pedophiles were attracted to the organization but didn’t do enough to track those suspected of abuse or warn parents of their presence in Scouting.
It is the first lawsuit against the Scouts in Pennsylvania since the release in October of thousands of pages of the Scouts’ secret “perversion files.” The files detail the cases of leaders kicked out of the Boy Scouts from the 1960s into the 1980s because they were accused of molesting Scouts.
In many cases, including two from the Lehigh Valley, the Boy Scouts dealt with accusations of abuse privately rather than calling on authorities to investigate, the files show.
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