Posted on 09/13/2011 4:38:47 PM PDT by decimon
PORTLAND, Ore/SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Four Oregon men sued the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday for $20 million over childhood sexual abuse they say they suffered at the hands of a pedophile knowingly appointed as their scoutmaster in the 1970s.
The four lawsuits, filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court in Portland, accuse the national Boy Scouts and its Cascade Pacific Council of negligence, fraud and sexual battery of a child in connection with the repeated molestation of the men, then aged 12 to 15.
The suits, each seeking $5.2 million in damages, are the latest in a barrage of such claims facing the Boy Scouts, headquartered in Texas, since the group was found liable and ordered to pay nearly $20 million last year for a pedophile case from the 1980s.
A separate case was filed against the Boy Scouts last week by five women who say they were sexually abused as girls by the leader of a coed Scouting program in Montana during the 1970s.
The latest cases bring to at least 35 the number of individuals who have lodged child sexual abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) in 11 states since 2007, said plaintiffs attorney Kelly Clark, whose Portland firm has spearheaded the legal action.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Under current BSA rules, no adult (other than a parent) is ever to be alone with a minor. All adult leaders must take “youth protection” training to learn the required procedures and to be aware of risks to children, and all parents are encouraged to take the training as well. Parents are also given safety materials to cover privately with their children.
At the management level, every effort is made to prevent adults who want to have sex with children or teenage boys from becoming leaders.
Aside from the complete elimination of bad people from the population, it’s hard to see what else the organization could do.
Perfection is not an option.
I'm both glad to see they've taken steps to reduce the possibility of abuse and sad to see that must detract from the scouting experience.
I felt the same about new priest accusations that dated back generations. It's impossible disprove or to prove particularly in cases where the accused is deceased.
If true, why did these boys not (1) earn the Rifle Merit Badge, and (2) use that knowledge? Alternatively, why did they not tell a parent/uncle/adult with the requisite knowledge, the appropriate firearm, and a shovel?
You forgot the criminal background check we Scout leaders need to get every year.
We work very hard to assure the safety of the boys under our care.
Also, the scout Youth Protection online course has been opened to the public. Anyone can take the course and many non-scout organizations use it for their people.
A friend of mine when I was in Junior High molested a couple of scouts (he was NOT a registered leader) and is in jail right now. He should have been executed.
clarify-Former friend who I have not seen in 30 some years
It was a problem in the 1960’s and 70’s. I know in my council a few scout leaders were prosecuted for sexual abuse of scouts at camp.
Partly because most of us were innocently dismissive of the idea that such things could be common. Especially when it came to people we wished to trust. Then things went in the other direction to a witch hunting phase.
There is a reason why the Boy Scouts changed their rules to seek out and ban gays in the Scouts. Pedophiles were amassing in scouting programs and raping the heck out of boys back then. I know two men who were raped in the Scouts as children. Gays are furious that they lost their easy pickings when the Scouts banned them. They should not have access to children in the schools. It’s serious.
Gays did the same thing in Catholic seminaries so they could have access to boys. They form a pedophile culture in targeted organizations that serve boys.
Innocence? I might have said that some years ago too. Now I better understand the prior generation. They weren’t that innocent. They just didn’t have any idea of the hyper victimology of today. Something went wrong, you dealt with it. Git hurt? You heal yourself and move on. Society expected certain normative behaviors. In public.
Society didn’t want to hear or have known abnormal behaviors, even as a victim, even as a predator, as long as one could present otherwise well, and the abuses were done discretely.
That was a comfort. All things considered. A method of healing, really. The comfort of normality, not just as an ideal, but as the expected practice in public.
The ethos of that era.
I don’t need money to make me “whole!” If you can’t make yourself “whole” through God, friends and family - then you probably can’t be made whole because you are too busy living and hanging onto the past!
One thing about boys, is they don’t tell when they are boys about what is going on because of shame and most times because homo pedophiles groom them in ways that makes them afraid to tell.
So when they are men and they finally confront what happened to them, they get angry about it until they get it worked out like the men close to me did and like you probably did, too.
If they want to sue the people who abused them and who abetted the abuse of them as boys, that is really fine. Each man has his own path to healing that assault on their soul. It is good for boys and their dads to hear and see men standing up to these beasts. Maybe they won’t be so afraid to tell their moms and dads and nip it in the bud before it brews and warps their being. That happens to many.
You are a strong man.
It was a problem in the 1960’s and 70’s. I know in my council a few scout leaders were prosecuted for sexual abuse of scouts at camp.
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But, did they wait 30-40 years to prosecute??
the number of cases of abuse (”intercourse before age 12:) in a recent CDC (US gov’t survey) was very high, especially in teenagers who claimed they were gay \Ditto for rape. (3 percent of men).
But no one wants to investigate who is doing what...and a lot of the articles that do discuss it put it into “non judgemental” language...as if having sex with an 11 year old was okay.
Yes, I didn’t cover every detail.
I wonder if these victims of so long ago are now homosexual men? Could this be that a homo activist group has gathered some gays who were once boy scouts and decided to blackmail the boy scouts? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They get sued if they don’t hire people who could possibly harm boys and then they are sued if someone actually does harm boys. I think this 30 time frame really is suspect.
Schools that have gay youth outreach programs are introducing minors to homo adults who then have access to these young people away from the school and parental control. This is asking for the abuse of kids by adults yet is is about gay sex so all is just fine.
It looks like a law firm has rounded up some people to sue. Whether the motive is mainly financial, or mainly trying to damage an institution that is resistant to the normalization of homosexuality, isn’t clear. Could be both.
Organizations are in a real bind, as you observe. If they attempt to exclude adults who want to have sex with children/teens, they’re sued for discrimination, but if they fail to exclude those adults, they’re held liable for the sexual activity with children/teens.
This is only a problem for private organizations, of course ... not public schools.
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