From the NY Times:
The Boy Scouts of America, an iconic presence in the nation’s experience for more than a century, filed for bankruptcy protection early Tuesday, succumbing to financial pressures that included a surge in legal costs over its handling of sexual abuse allegations.
Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts have long maintained internal files at their headquarters in Texas detailing decades of allegations involving nearly 8,000 “perpetrators,” according to an expert hired by the organization. Lawyers have said in recent months that former scouts have come forward to identify hundreds of other abusers not included in those files.
The bankruptcy filing, in Delaware, is expected to disrupt continuing litigation and establish a deadline for when former scouts can pursue claims.
The Boy Scouts of America has been struggling for decades. In 2018 they officially opened the program to girls as part of a response to declining membership.
Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh unveiled the group's "Scout Me In" marketing campaign aimed at promoting inclusiveness. “As we enter a new era for our organization, it is important that all youth can see themselves in Scouting in every way possible," Surbaugh said.
Change has been coming quickly to the iconic if shrinking organization. In October, it announced it would provide programs for girls. Several months before that, the group announced it would accept and register transgender youths into its organization.
In 2015, it ended its ban on gay leaders.
The BSA has been struggling to hold its place in America for years; membership peaked in 1972 at 6.5 million members, and has been wavering downward ever since. The Times reports current membership at 2.4 million members. (No breakdown of any membership gains from allowing girls to participate in the program.)
The Boy Scouts’ charter from Congress, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, lauded the organization’s role in teaching boys patriotism, courage and self-reliance. More than 110 million Americans have participated in Boy Scouts programs over the years.
Under bankruptcy proceedings, organizations are able to halt lawsuits and then get a deadline under which people must file claims. Mr. Kosnoff [a lawyer who has long worked on Boy Scouts cases] said those are often between 90 days and nine months, but he plans to advocate a yearlong window in this case.
He also would like to see the case lead to a robust process to seek out potential victims who might have a claim.
The basic question underlying this is, how did an organization that places a high value on character go so wrong for so long? For all the sexual predators that festered within the organization, many more did their best to live up to the ideals of Scouting. It is a failure of leadership at the highest levels, and those who covered this up for so long will likely walk away.
There have been warning signs all along. The Times article mentions high salaries earned by professional scouters. As a former Scout volunteer leader, one of the things I saw was changes in local administration, in which small councils were merged into ever larger councils. Along the way, this led to the closing of local Scouting offices and the sale of camps and other facilities that had become redundant with the mergers — but also eliminated decades of local connections and traditions.
While the mergers were promoted as providing more efficiency, one of the effects was also to see the salaries of the professional Scout executives get a bump, because they were tied to the number of Scouts in a council. Bigger councils = bigger salaries. There were always tensions between volunteer leaders and the ‘professionals’; this exacerbated them even as control of the councils became distanced from local leadership and community ties.
For many decades Scouting’s national HQ was based on the East Coast; in 1979 headquarters was moved to Irving, Texas. Although abuse problems go back much further than that, was there anything in the politics of the move and the leadership pool it drew on that led to the current situation? It was after that move that membership began its downward trajectory. There needs to be a thorough examination of the leadership culture at the national level and how it functioned — the big question is who can do it and have the results accepted as credible? The organization’s own national leadership appears to be fatally tainted. Have there been any resignations at the top?
The long-running ties between the Boy Scouts of America and the Church of Latter Day Saints also deserves some scrutiny. The LDS broke away from the BSA in 2018 over BSA allowing gay Scouts, gay leaders, and girls’women into the BSA. For decades the Boy Scouts had been the de facto youth program for LDS boys — but along with that came LDS suppression of its own sex abuse cases among the Scout Troops it sponsored. That cover-up is the subject of a 2020 documentary film.
The effects of this at the personal level for those involved in Scouting are going to be devastating. What does this mean for current Scouts and their leaders, and the local organizations that sponsor troops? What does this mean for the hundreds of Scout camps around the country, from national bases like Philmont down to the local summer camps? What does this mean for the thousands of people who volunteer their time as merit badge counselors to share their skills with youths looking to discover their own interests? What does this mean for the millions of youths who learn basic first aid skills and water safety through Scouting? What does this mean for the communities where local Scouting has long been a part of volunteer efforts?
What does this mean for children who are currently Scouts and have to deal with the fall out from this?
It should be remembered that the Boy Scouts of America is not the be-all and end-all of Scouting. The movement is international. One place to look for answers is how Scouting is run in other countries and how they have dealt with these and other issues. It’s clear that national leadership has failed — how far down does the rot go?
What has happened here is a tragedy, and not just for the victims of abuse. It is also a tragedy for all those who believe in the values Scouting is supposed to stand for. How it can be saved, if it can be saved, while doing justice to all who have been betrayed is the question going forward.