Who Do They Think They Are, the Vatican?

It's going to be a tough two weeks for the Boy Scouts of America as details pour out of the organization's decades of suppressing information about child molesters in their midst.

A Los Angeles Times review of 1600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 has found that scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign — and helped many cover their tracks.

Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, "chronic brain dysfunction" and duties at a Shakespeare festival.

The details are contained in the organisation's confidential "perversion files", a blacklist of alleged molesters, that the Scouts have used internally since 1919. Scouts' lawyers around the country have been fighting in court to keep the files from public view.

 

The blacklist often didn't work: men expelled for alleged abuses slipped back into the program, only to be accused of molesting again. Now, a more extensive review has shown that Scouts sometimes abetted molesters by keeping allegations under wraps.

In the majority of cases, the Scouts learned of alleged abuse after it had been reported to authorities. But in more than 500 instances, the Scouts learned about it from victims, parents, staff members or anonymous tips.

In about 400 of those cases — 80 per cent — there is no record of Scouting officials reporting the allegations to police. In more than 100 of the cases, officials actively sought to conceal the alleged abuse or allowed the suspects to hide it, the Times found.

The official Scout motto is, of course, "Be Prepared." 

"Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting,

"Why, for any old thing." said Baden-Powell. 

Any old thing, indeed.