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Like the Catholic Church, Penn State, and other organizations that engage youth, the Boy Scouts have had a great deal of terrible press in the past few days and weeks. For example, this week over 1,000 files of scout leaders accused of sexual violations with boy scouts were released. The parallels between the boy scouts and with the Catholic Church are striking. Leaders found to have had inappropriate sexual contact with boys, “perversion files” were kept, police and child protection resources were generally not informed, and these leaders either continued in scouting elsewhere or disappeared to perhaps abuse more boys. Names were finally made public, lawsuits filed, and you know the rest of the story.
For those of us who work in this area none of these shocking news reports are new or surprising. My view with the media on this typically is “what took you so long to finally pay attention?” We know that child sexual and physical abuse is tragically common and appears to have been especially frequent in the 1960-1980s. All organizations that serve youth (e.g., churches, schools, youth sports, scouts) where men have access to and power over young people with minimal supervision have many cases of sexual abuse that has or has not yet been discovered or made public. Research tells us that just about 4% of priests in the Catholic
Church sexually violated a minor between about 1950 and 2006. A report conducted for the US Department of Education and published in 2005 found higher figures of child sexual abuse by school personnel during a similar time frame. While we don’t know for sure how many men have sexually violated a child in the general population we know that the numbers must be high since about 25% of adult woman and about 15% of adult men say that they were sexually violated as a child by an adult when they were young. So, if you think that sexual abuse doesn’t occur in all large organizations with ready access to children you are deceiving yourself. Fortunately, with much better awareness, policies and procedures among organizations that serve youth, mandatory child abuse reporting laws, and better education these numbers have been decreasing since the 1980s.
So, like the Catholic Church, youth sports, and now scouts we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Policies and procedures are now in place to maximize the odds that children are now safe in scouts among other organizations like the Catholic Church. These organizations certainly have been and continue to be hammered in the press from events that happened long ago but today much has been done to keep kids safe in these
organizations. Of course, all the best policies and procedures in the world for screening, training, reporting, and keeping children safe from harm are only as good as their implementation. That’s the rub. Churches, scouting, education, and youth sports all offer so much to the positive and formative development of children but all those involved with these organization must follow their own policies and procedures to make it all works and keep kids safe.
So what do you think?
