Childhood's end
Will youth enrichment programs survive the American legal system?
The recent settlement of the sex-abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America was intended to resolve the issue so that the organization could survive while ensuring that victims of abuse at the hands of adult volunteers were fairly compensated.
Some claimants, however, have refused to accept the court-approved settlement, and others are now working with attorneys to sue the community nonprofit groups that sponsored local Scout units: churches, service clubs, veterans organizations.
No child should ever be abused, sexually or otherwise. It is the most heinous crime one can imagine.
And yet, it is entirely possible that future generations of American children will never experience summer camp away from home, going on stage to perform a ballet, or learning how to play a sport because the financial liability of offering a youth enrichment program will simply be too high for any organization to bear.
Noticeably absent from the recent litigation over abuse in Scout units was the culpability of those adults who actually committed the abuse.
Some were arrested when their abuse was reported, some stood trial, a few were actually sentenced.
Most of the others (and the vast majority of allegations occurred before 1990, when the BSA instituted its Youth Protection Program) were simply dismissed from Scouting, barred from future roles in the organization.
The ugly truth is that until recently, society as a whole did not take child abuse seriously. Victims were rarely believed, and arrests and prosecution were even more rare.
In the 1960s and ’70s, up through the ’80s, sexual predation of children was viewed — and treated — as a mental disorder more than a criminal act in most states. A convicted child abuser was more likely to be sentenced to counseling than prison.
As we’ve seen in the recent cases involving Olympic gymnastics programs and the Penn State football program, sexual abuse of children was never confined to the Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church. Nor were those the only two organizations to engage in top-level coverups of allegations.
They were — and are — culturally controversial organizations that made them easy marks for the national media to pile on.
But as we’ve seen with the gymnastics and Penn State football scandals, there was nothing unique to the way the Scouts or Catholic Church reacted to having their own accused of sexually abusing children.
It turns out it is human nature to want to believe the denials of adults with whom we are familiar and friendly when faced with allegations of monstrous crimes.
None of this is to excuse in any way the institutional failings of Scout leaders, Catholic bishops, Penn State administrators, or U.S. Olympic officials.
Their primary job was to protect the children.
Period.
I have been a volunteer coach and Scout leader for more than quarter of a century now. For six years, I was a professional Scout employee. I served more than 110 Scout units, with some 1,200 youth and more than 300 adult volunteers.
Unfortunately, during that time allegations were brought to my attention as the local field rep.
In most cases, I knew the accused — and had a hard time squaring the accusations with the person I thought I knew.
This is where training and protocols came in.
It didn’t matter what I thought of the accusation. Once I received it, my role was clear: I immediately notified my Scouting superiors, and depending on the accusation, the local police or child protection agency. No hesitation, no waiting.
I didn’t have to believe the accusation. I didn’t have to like the process.
My obligation was to protect the youth, and this was the process put in place to do so, and so I followed it to the letter. One time, I had to call my Scout executive after midnight when I received a call from a unit on an out-of-town campout. As soon as he saw it was my number, he was pretty sure why I was calling. He took that call before the second ring.
Since the Boy Scouts instituted its Youth Protection Program some three decades ago, the reported incidence of abuse has plummeted.
The reason is that at the heart of the Youth Protection Program is removing opportunity for abuse to occur. No adult can have one on one contact with a youth who is not their own child. Every Scout event, every gathering, must have at least two trained adults at all times — more adults if there is a larger number of youth. Every adult volunteer must undergo a criminal background check. All adult leaders have to re-take the Youth Protection Training every two years, and that training is constantly updated to reflect the latest developments in the law, as well as our understanding of how abusers target victims.
Every sports league where I’ve volunteered has similar protections in place. So do church groups, music programs, and organizations such as the Boys & Girls Clubs.
And yet, while far less frequently than in the past, abuse still happens.
As the Boy Scout case worked its way through the courts, some of Scouting’s most prominent partners announced they would no longer sponsor units. Fear of being sued is driving most of these decisions. Others simply don’t want the stain of guilt by association attached to their reputation.
And even in those Scout troops and packs that still have a sponsor, fewer families are signing up. Who wants to expose their children to potential abusers?
The fact that the overwhelming number of allegations were more than 30 years old didn’t make the headlines: All many parents know about the Boy Scouts is that they’re being sued for sexual abuse.
We’re seeing fewer families sign up, though, all across youth enrichment programs.
COVID was a big part of it, too, but parents today are more fearful for their children’s safety and well-being than their parents were in the 1980s — despite murder, kidnapping and abuse rates today being only a fraction of what they were back then.
Both social media and the legacy media are far more focused today on coverage of horrible crimes than the media was in the 1960s and ’70s. A psychiatrist who studied mental health and media exposure in the 1990s found that while local television stations and newspapers would generally only cover murders and kidnappings in their immediate community in the previous decades, in the 1980s there was a shift to where what had once been local tragedies became national tragedies. Every shooting became a national story, every kidnapping.
(The psychiatrist found that being exposed to local tragedies was actually less stressful, because you could act on your feelings by helping the local victims through contributing to a fundraiser, cooking a meal, attending a memorial, etc. Being exposed to violence outside your community brought all the same stress reaction, but fewer ways of dealing with that stress.)
With cell phones and laptops, today’s media is far more prominent in our lives. Our exposure to the news is no longer limited to the morning paper and the 5 o’clock news — it’s a constant barrage of violence and suffering bombarding our senses 24 hours a day.
It’s no wonder today’s young parents hesitate to sign their kids up for ballet or theater, softball or soccer, gymnastics or scouts. Their sense of the actual scale of the threat to their children has been distorted.
(Nor is keeping your children home rather than signing them up for sports, arts
, or leadership programs keeping them any safer — we know from years of study that the vast majority of child abuse is committed by an adult relative or a close friend of the family.)
Youth enrichment programs were almost all a 20th century development. They frankly would have been impossible when most families lived and worked on farms, spread out across the countryside.
Lord Baden Powell returned home to England after the Boer War in South Africa and found juvenile crime was skyrocketing in London.
He founded the Scouts to give boys a sense of belonging and a structured program to guide them in leadership development.
That some approach was quickly expanded to the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.
Big Brothers was founded in 1904, Camp Fire in 1912, 4-H in 1914, Junior Achievement in 1919, Key Club (part of Kiwanis) in 1925, the YMCA’s Adventure Guides (formerly Indian Guides) in 1927, Future Farmers of America in 1928, Pop Warner football in 1929. Little League was organized in 1939, AYSO Soccer in 1964.
All of these programs aimed to offer young people opportunities to socialize and learn specific skills — whether it was hitting a baseball or starting a campfire.
And all of them took off from humble beginnings to become national programs serving tends of thousands of youth each because young people and their families found the programs to be rewarding.
We ought to be able to keep children safe and offer them a variety of extra-curricular enrichment programs.
But providing a viable opportunity for those who would build or sustain youth enrichment programs requires a transparent legal framework with clearly delineated liability.
Nobody wants to deny an abused child from seeking redress from their abuser.
But it is that abuser who should bear the greatest responsibility for the harm they cause.
Denying tens of millions of other children the life-changing experiences that participation in sports, the arts, leadership development or outdoors activities can bring does nothing to advance justice.
As we are seeing with the Olympic sports, there is a demand for Congress to set national standards on youth protection.
A proper framework would:
● Establish baseline criteria for training adult volunteers in recognizing signs of abuse and how to respond
● Set up a national criminal database where any registered youth-serving nonprofit could vet prospective volunteers
● Define measurements to ensure that youth protections are being consistently implemented in youth-serving programs (i.e., that two trained adults are present at all times, adults are properly trained, etc.)
● Designate a process for filing suspicions of abuse, with clear-cut protocols for removing accused adults from contact with youth while the allegations are investigated
● Maintain a universal database of all adults who have been found to have violated youth protection guidelines, regardless of whether they were arrested or charged - and prevent them from ever serving in another youth-serving organization
Organizations that follow these designated national standards would have limited liability for any abuse that occurred so long as they could demonstrate consistent implementation of those standards.
If an organization takes all reasonable and prudent precautions to prevent abusers from accessing children in their program — as established by Congress — they should not face fiscal ruination if an abuser manages to sidestep these precautions. Responsibility, yes — but not ruin. A well-run, well-organized program offering enrichment programs for children should not only be allowed to continue offering those programs for future generations, we should want them to.
Now, the person who committed the abuse?
Ruination sounds about right.
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That is horrible. Clearly, the youth protection rules were NOT being followed, or the Scoutmaster would have had no opportunity to abuse those kids. I hope the court throws the book at him, and pray that those children find the peace in their souls they deserve.
My son’s scout experience was unfortunately disrupted by a similar case. A scout master was quietly sexually abusing a number of kids. It took a while, their case was finally brought to court last year.
I’m glad that my son got to experience a number of Summer Camps, he was a member of many clubs such as the wetlands and spent many weekends camping in the wilderness, outward bound holidays and he is a King’s Scout today, inactive. Sadly, he lost his passion to serve.