USA TODAY: Disturbing sex abuse claims made against Boy Scouts

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/04/24/boy-scouts-face-hundreds-new-sexual-abuse-claims/3547991002/


More than 200 individuals have come forward with new allegations of sexual abuse by members of the Boy Scouts of America in recent weeks as a trio of law firms seek to uncover unidentified child abusers.

A few of the victims are young, still underage or in their 20s, but many have held their secrets close for decades.

"Nobody would have listened to me," said James Kretschmer, 56, who says a leader groped him at a Boy Scouts camp when he was in middle school. "The problem is, then you think, ‘Is it something I did? What was I doing, was it my fault? If I hadn’t done whatever, he wouldn’t have done that.’ It took me years and years to realize it wasn’t that little child’s fault. It was the adult who had control."

Samuel, 17, said he was fondled by a leader a decade ago, who told him, "Don’t say anything.

"For awhile, I lived with those three words," Samuel said. "That’s why I didn’t say anything.”


Advised by Tim Kosnoff, an attorney who has litigated more than a thousand cases of sexual misconduct against organizations such as the Scouts and the Mormon church, the group of attorneys said it has identified 150 alleged pedophiles never before publicly accused.

The law firms began running TV and Google ads encouraging victims to sign on as clients for a potential lawsuit after a report in December that Boy Scouts of America prepared for a possible Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The volume already gathered could double the number of legal cases the organization already is facing, although a bankruptcy would halt existing and future litigation, the attorneys told USA TODAY.

In a statement about the new allegations, Boy Scouts of America said, "Any incident of child abuse is one too many, and nothing is more important than the safety and protection of children in our Scouting programs."

Wish I could sue for not being included :(

Wow. This is really sad. How many young lives were hurt?

Nearly 8,000 Alleged Child Abusers Identified In Boy Scouts' Files, Review Finds
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boy-scouts-sexual-abuse-figures_n_5cc059c1e4b01b6b3efb0e78
I know of at least 10 child victims of MORmON rapists, many of whom are millionaires now thanks to Tim Kosnoff.

Sex Suits? You mean like a scoutmaster's uniform?

Or a new type of wet suit.
Talk about a new big wave.

Mormonism jumped ship.
Sinking the boy's scouts.

Abandon ship
Relationship

The older gets colder and colder.
As it gets bolder and bolder.

Time for the wet suits.
The law suits it fine.

Until it is against it.
The truth, that is.

LDSinc... Take your lashes!
It'll give you more rashes.

PS- this crap doesn't go here!
SHIfT, it goes at the bottom...
Of the pile. Even if you smile.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2019 04:26AM by moremany.

Some percentage of these is going to complete horse crap. People with a story looking for a payout.

The percentage of claims that are false will be far lower than the percentage of victims who are too intimidated or humiliated to report their abuse.

We will never now for sure.

No, Phazer, we will someday know. We know today. You can look it up if you want although that may lead to information that contradicts your worldview.

We won't know about the person that died and kept that dark past with them to their grave never to be reported and unknown forever.

You just reversed yourself.

In your first post you were worried that people would victimize the Boy Scouts by registering false claims. In your words,

"Some percentage of these is going to complete horse crap. People with a story looking for a payout."

Now you are worried that the Boy Scouts won't be penalized enough. In your words,

"We won't know about the person that died and kept that dark past with them to their grave never to be reported and unknown forever."

Your latter position is closer to the truth. Just like the Catholic and Mormon churches, the BSA will only ever be held responsible for a fraction of the abuse it tolerated and concealed.

You said one day we would know.

I gave an example.

A supposed victim could claim an incident, get a payout, and it also be lie. Though we wouldn't ever know because that person dies and keeps the truth themselves.

All in all, I think a lot of folks will be given tough love, an apology, and a go away and continue building your live,seek therapy if still needed.

No matter what, it is incalculable to know the truth from the fraud sitting on your butt inputing data into this forum.

Phazer, you dissemble.

You were from the beginning concerned with people making claims against august institutions; you worried that some of those claims would be "complete horse crap. People with a story looking for a payout."

I said that the percentage of unreported abuse cases will dwarf that of false claims. You answered that "we will never now [sic] for sure." That is of course nonsense. There are mountains of sociological data on the rates of reportage for victims of rape and child abuse.

You then switched positions and cited the case of a victim who WHO DID NOT REPORT his abuse. That was my point, not yours. It is silly for you to claim otherwise since your words are a few posts above for all the world to see.

No worries, though, for soon you returned to your original pro-authoritarian stance. "All in all, I think a lot of folks will be given tough love, an apology, and a go away and continue building your live,seek therapy if still needed." Which means, of course, that you think it's okay if a victim is given "tough love" and an "apology" and forced to "go away." Like your original statement in support of institutions that tolerate child abuse, this suggests a deficit in empathy. Indeed, your callousness brings to mind the thoughts of Boyd Packer who likened being sexually molested to like having a "very, very bad experience in the second semester of the first grade." Packer demonstrated a similar bias in favor of institutions over children.

The point is that your instinctive defense of authoritative organizations disinclines you to think about the interests of the individual--or of the collective of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of abused individuals. That is unfortunate, because we live in an era in which people are throwing their freedoms at the feet of populist dictators. The thing is that one day you disregard the losses to some people with whom you do not identify, and the next day they come for you.

As for your final sentence, namely, "No matter what, it is incalculable to know the truth from the fraud sitting on your butt inputing data into this forum." I think you mean "impossible" and not "incalculable." Oh, and perhaps you could stop "sitting on your butt" and read up on the actual rates of abuse versus rates of reportage. That's what a dispassionate thinker would do, and the effort required to do so is anything but "incalculable."

As much as you read up on this stuff you are still not going to know. Just accept it.

"I know you are but what am I?"

holding the individual perpetrators responsible versus blaming some huge organization with millions of members (mostly all volunteers) and seeking to hold the whole organization responsible (for monetary damages) for the actions of some individual perpetrators who were successful at hiding their proclivities from pretty much everyone they ever interacted with for most of their lives.

Without some reasonable line drawing, all such organizations will ultimately have to stop operating.

Many of the stories involve victims who admittedly told no one about what happened at the time that it happened. It's of course very understandable that they were intimidated and frightened by the perpetrators. But in the absence of any outward signs of wrongdoing and no reports, what would the BSA organization reasonably have been expected to do?

Would it have been reasonable for the BSA to administer monthly lie-detector tests to all volunteer scout leaders at every local level and ask the volunteer scout leaders probing questions about their sexual urges and activity? Would a policy like that have triggered a whole different line of complaints and lawsuits against the organization?

Should each local leader go through a rigorous FBI-style background check before being accepted as a local volunteer leader? What would that cost? (And history is full of examples of people who got sensitive positions in government AFTER passing such background checks...and who then ultimately went on to engage in massive wrongdoing.)

There probably are some cases where an organization like the BSA could be seen to act with gross negligence. In a case where a convicted pedophile is knowingly allowed to "serve" as a leader, there could be a case for holding the BSA management responsible. In a case where complaints are made about a leader and nothing is done about it, a case could probably be made.

But in cases where nobody but the perpetrator and the victim ever knew that anything happened until the victim decided to speak out some many years later, what, really, could the BSA have done about it when the events in question were going on? It's a horrible situation for the victim. The perpetrator should definitely be called to account to the full extent possible. But what could the organization have reasonably done to prevent the incident in the first place?

There are a couple of issues here.

First, an organization is not responsible for actions taken by individuals where it did not know, and should not have known, what was happening. As long as the entity does what is reasonable, as defined by the law, it is not culpable. Where culpability attaches is when the organization does not rise to that level and particularly in cases in which it conceals abuse and protects the abusers so they can continue their crimes.

Think Catholic Church: an institution so afraid of reputational harm and so wedded to the notion that priests are a higher class of human that it routinely discouraged reports of abuse, stymied judicial inquiries, and moved known pedophiles from one congregation to another. Should the large number of members who derive benefits from the RCC obviate that church's responsibility to the victims of its cynical conduct? I think the answer is obvious.

The question is therefore whether the Boy Scouts, or the LDS Church, or any other organization, behaved like the Catholic Church. If so, they should be punished. As for the members, shouldn't the rule of tort law--that the costs of compensating victims are a normal business expense--also apply here? If a car company sells a poor product and people get hurt, for instance, the costs of recompense accrue to the owners. By the same token, if the BSA or the LDS Church have wittingly purveyed a flawed product that hurts people badly, shouldn't it bear the financial costs of that misbehavior? And if those costs bankrupt the organization, doesn't that mean that the organization SHOULD be shut down?

Regarding your question about whether something like FBI background investigations should be required for scout leaders, I'd think the answer is no. But what about normal background investigations like those conducted by schools or businesses operating in contact with the public? I say, "hell yes." If I were running the Boy Scouts, I'd implement such a policy immediately both to protect my organization and, more importantly, to protect the children.

For centuries the costs of institutions' permission of child abuse were imposed on the victims of that abuse, the families of those victims, and the victims of the victims. We are fortunate to live in a time when society has decided that such institutional behavior is criminal and that the victims are not to blame.

There does have to be a line-drawing rationale at some point, however, that weighs (i) the net benefits to society (or to some significant segment thereof, as they perceive it) of a large organization that is generally engaged in positive activities against (ii) the inevitability that, in a non-profit organization staffed by thousands of volunteers, a small number of those volunteers will turn out to be bad people who do bad things.

To a large extent, I think we're in agreement on the principle that negligence and willful misconduct standards can be applied in determining whether and the extent to which a large non-profit organization can be held financially liable (for damages) caused by unsanctioned bad conduct of their volunteers. Wittingly, knowingly putting a pedophile or sex offender in a position to interact with vulnerable young people is an obvious basis for holding the organization liable, and especially the decision makers who were involved. Not conducting reasonable interviews and CV (resume) fact-checking may be enough to trigger negligence-related liability in some cases (particularly where a simple verification process would have uncovered red flags). In the case of the Catholic Church, the theory of liability isn't really based on the fact that some priests turned out to be bad. The liability is mainly based on the fact that leaders of the organization knew about the baddies and covered it up. To the extent that this also applies to the BSA and its decision makers, the BSA should be liable.

Failing to detect a potential offender in advance, however, is a whole other can of worms, especially given the fact that such people are often very skilled at avoiding detection--so skilled that often their own families and friends are surprised. (At this point I'm thinking about the famous Mormon guy in Korea who recently got busted for meth and other things and how surprised everyone who knew him was when it came out. Just about everyone who knew him thought of him as "father of the year" material just a few months ago. Now, not so much. If someone like that had (and he probably did at some point) volunteered to be a boy scout leader, it would have been practically impossible to find out anything wrong in his background without hiring a private investigator to tail him around for several months.)

And it doesn't seem reasonable to apply a "product liability" or "strict liability" theory to an organization like the BSA--especially when the defect in the design is simply the fact that the organization has humans in it and, as we all know, any large collection of humans, numbering in the thousands or millions, is going to include some that go bad. At this point, I'm waiting for a bold law firm to take the obvious next leap forward: Filing a class action law suit against the entire human collective, minus the members of the certified class, because when you think about it, it's possible to come up with a theory of liability against anyone living in this world who was not pro-actively engaged in both preventing bad people from doing bad things as well as discovering and rooting out bad people doing bad things so that they cannot do any more bad things. A difficult task to be sure, but we're all part of a large organization called humans of planet earth--and if Ricky Snottblow down the lane was ever spending time playing a video game or eating a superfluous bowl of frosted flakes that means that Ricky was obviously not discharging his responsibilities to society and needs to pay--unless he can somehow get himself included in the certified class.

We don't disagree much.

I avoided "strict liability" language for the reason you suggest. All I am saying is that it is entirely reasonable to expect organizations to do reasonable background checks. If they do that and a child abuser (or other criminal) slips through the cracks, there is no liability--assuming that the organization terminates and reports the abuser as soon as it has reason to know.

As for a cost/benefit analysis about an organization, surely the standard should not vary according to its nature. All institutions should be required to exercise due diligence. Period.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> Regarding your question about whether something
> like FBI background investigations should be
> required for scout leaders, I'd think the answer
> is no.
But what about normal background
> investigations like those conducted by schools or
> businesses operating in contact with the public?
> I say, "hell yes." If I were running the Boy
> Scouts, I'd implement such a policy immediately
> both to protect my organization and, more
> importantly, to protect the children.
>

Normal background check may considt of:
employment, education, criminal records, credit history, motor vehicle and license record checks.

I bet it's possible that all these pervs passed these with flying colors and didn't have any public indicators to red flag them.

That was a minor point in my argument.

Yes, background reports won't catch all the perpetrators. But they will catch many, and that is the point.

The broader issue is whether an organization like the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts will be allowed to continue to conceal abuse and protect abusers. Preemptive identification of perpetrators is great, but retroactively identifying them--and reporting them to law enforcement--is both easier and the essence of institutional responsibility.

Any organization that deals with children must do both, and if it fails in the latter regard--reporting to law enforcement--it should be shut down and its leaders punished condignly.

The abuse will continue. Some in leadership will catch on to who is doing the abusing and react. Others in leadership may never find out until decades later.

The methods to get the story out is all that has improved. Perhaps and informed and observing and inquisitive open minded parent is all that is needed. The non bending religious type is blind to reality and will brush off outlandish stories from their kids about Mr Jones / Mrs Robinson and their inappropriate behavior as pure fantasy.

No, it is not just the reporting that has gotten better. It is also the public understanding of what sexual molestation does to a person, the criminal laws, the willingness of juries to take abuse seriously, and the penalties imposed on individuals and organizations for hiding the crimes and the criminals.

The institutions are not handling things better because the leaders are wise and caring. They are handling things better because if they don't, they may well be bankrupted and their leaders imprisoned.

Wally, all public school teachers in my neck of the woods are required to get police background checks (that we pay for) before beginning employment. If we switch school districts, we must get a new background check. It is not a huge cost. The BSA/SUSA could easily afford this.

Supposedly the BSA/SUSA has a "two deep" structure for leadership (the children will always be around two adults.) Perhaps the kids should have the same rule -- they are always around at least one other child.

I think that yearly, mandatory training is needed as well -- not only for the leaders but also for the kids and their parents. The kids need to be told in an age-appropriate way was is/is not acceptable and that they must immediately report unacceptable behavior to their parents. The parents must be given a protocol as well (i.e. contact the police or CPS.) Have everyone sign off that they received this training.

The cost of such background checks for all BSA personnel would presumably be less than the cost of two or three court settlements, meaning that on a cost-benefit basis the Scouts shouldn't think twice about this modest measure. And the fact that it is legal liability that is driving the economics, causing them to align with moral responsibility, shows that the legal system is not totally off the mark.

Those all sound like reasonable precautions to me.

Lottie and Wally,

Excellent points here. But, Human factors failings often interfere with well-designed, well-intentioned systems in my experience.

For example, one of the databases which is run by the government agency for which I work, is the sexual offender registry. The requirements for registration are extremely strict, failure to re-register every 90 days in person and be re-photographed will result in an immediate arrest warrant. Failure to promptly notify of Change of address can result in life imprisonment. So as you can imagine this database is extremely accurate and is updated continually.

Anyone can search the database with a web interface, by name of offender or by neighborhoods, so, a quick check of anyone being considered for a scout, or bishop or priest position, takes minutes at most.

So where does such a useful and easily accessed system fail? It is through all the organizations who have their lawyers call our lawyers and demand, immediately, a copy of the entire file.

Apparently they just want to have it, printed out in a drawer or something. Literally, we receive 50 demands a month for this. And any time an organization uses an outdated list like that, they are blowing it. They might be looking at a list from a year ago , just to save themselves the effort of typing names into our online web interface.

This is just one example that came to my mind as to how lots of predators are not identified before being let loose with children—just old fashioned human laziness which will get around even the best system out there.

So, thinking about the institutional culpability for abuse, I see ways like this, using a copy of an outdated list, that even well-intentioned requirements and rules can fail, just through people wanting to cut a corner and save a few minutes.

Mel,

If you are correct that organizations are using lawyers who cut corners, we will soon see that those organizations are liable. companies and private institutions are responsible for doing what is reasonable, and courts may well decide that the sort of box checking you describe is not enough.

No system for preventing abuse is foolproof, but the cases we are discussing--the RCC, the LDS Church, and the BSA--seem to be clear cut. In those cases the organizations not only stopped short of due diligence, they appear also to have actively and systematically violated the law.

Isn’t this what Sam Young tried to warn the church about? Those weird interviews can lead to trouble in a large enough number of cases that it’s not worth it. Legal standards are changing. When there are sharks about, don’t chum the water.

Unfortunately, any organization that collects prey under one roof is going to be a magnet for predators. That’s a problem for TSCC too. Women are better creep detectors than men. Never mind the Priesthood holder rule. Any ward camp out should be required to have someone from the Relief Society.

babyloncansuckit wrote,
>
> Unfortunately, any organization that collects prey
> under one roof is going to be a magnet for
> predators. That’s a problem for TSCC too. Women
> are better creep detectors than men. Never mind
> the Priesthood holder rule. Any ward camp out
> should be required to have someone from the Relief
> Society.

Collects prey, yes!

And yeah, having overnight camping trips could stymie male predators of kids but TSCC is so afraid of men and women mixing together unless married, that will probably never happen.

Why are the BSA threads being deleted?

I hadn't noticed. It could be because there were so many on the same topic.

I see three threads about it on the first page.

Aside from numerous cases of gross negligence, neglect, and abuse, the suit alleges numerous cases of children being placed with known--registered!--sex offenders.

It is another example of monstrous institutional irresponsibility and an illustration of the fact that one must be very careful when ceding personal moral responsibility to authority.

"when ceding personal moral responsibility to authority"


a phrase to ponder ...

Yeah, like when you get married...