The Washington
State supreme court has forced the Boy Scouts of America
to turn over "ineligible volunteer" files that reveal a
sexual abuse problem among Scout leaders that is far
greater than the organization previously admitted.
Although justices
ruled that the files themselves would not be made
public, attorneys said the Boy Scouts "have ejected at least
5,100 adult leaders nationwide for sexual abuse
allegations since 1946," according to the Seattle Times.
In the past 15
years, the organization has kicked out leaders for abuse
allegations at a rate of one every other day.
The ruling
stemmed from a 2003 suit filed by two former scouts,
brothers Tom and Matt Stewart, now men in their 40s,
who say they were sexually molested by a scoutmaster
over many years.
The records they
obtained show that, as part of the "ineligible
volunteer" files, the organization retained information on
1,000 "degenerates." The Stewarts' attorneys counted
732 "degenerate" files from 1946 to 1971 among the 45
boxes of files ordered disclosed by the BSA.
Lumped together
as "degenerates" were both volunteers known to be gay
and known to be pedophiles.
Jon Davidson,
legal director of Lambda Legal, told Gay.com that the Boy
Scouts of America understood that those two groups had
little, if anything, to do with each other.
"Even the
organization's literature says it's a myth that gay men are
more likely to engage in sexual abuse than straight men,"
Davidson said. "They never have asserted that
(potential pedophilia) is a reason to exclude gay men
from the Scouts. They simply insist that gay men don't
make good role models."
In the 1990s,
Lambda Legal fought to reinstate James Dale as scoutmaster
after the Boy Scouts kicked him out upon learning he is gay.
Though Dale and Lambda Legal were victorious in the
New Jersey appeals court and the New Jersey supreme
court, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the unanimous
decision, ruling that because it is a private group, the Boy
Scouts had a constitutional right to exclude openly
gay people from leadership positions. The organization
also does not allow openly gay scouts.
Davidson was
quick to reject the notion that pedophilia involving boys
and homosexual sex are related.
"Pedophiles often
become Boy Scout leaders because they can have access
to kids. But for most of them, it's about (abusing) kids
before puberty, and the gender of the child is less
important. Research has shown that the group least
likely to engage with sex with boys are open and out
gay men."
The new
revelations have put the Scouts under closer scrutiny for
their handling of molestation charges and potential
abuse.
David Finkelhor,
who heads the Crimes Against Children Research Center at
the University of New Hampshire, told Gay.com that, for the
15 years he served on a board of advisers that helped
Scouts combat abuse, he was frustrated by their
secrecy.
"On the one hand,
they had developed a very progressive and
comprehensive abuse prevention program and put time and
money into that, and at the same time they
wouldn't even let our board see files that would have
helped us track cases over time," Finkelhor said.
Although Scout
officials won't talk about the cases, they affirm that
volunteers represent a small fraction of the 1.2 million
adults who participate in the organization every
year and stress that new background checks and
training prevent such problems.
Despite the new
safeguards, the secrecy in the 97-year-old organization
closely mirrors the stonewalling of the Roman Catholic
Church, according to David Clohessy, national director
of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
"In many
institutions, especially those with rigid, clear lines of
authority, there is a temptation to obsess over public image
and perceived short-term damage from scandal and
litigation rather than focusing on real long-term
solutions, and the most glaring example of that is the
Catholic Church," Clohessy told Gay.com.
Clohessy, who has
counseled dozens of abused scouts over the years, in
addition to those who were abused in the church, said he
expects many more scouts to come forward with these
new revelations.
"The strongest
motivator for coming forward is public awareness,"
Clohessy said.
"And that hinges
on legal actions. Unfortunately, that's tough when you
have an arbitrary statute of limitations that can give
victims no legal options. That tends to keep them
trapped in shame and isolation." (Larry Buhl, Gay.com)
