I feel a certain sadness about the Boy Scouts of America. I was a Boy Scout in my time. As pointed out, like with the Catholic Church, “Most of the newly surfacing cases date to the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s; the organization says there were only five known abuse victims in 2018. The Boy Scouts credit the change to an array of prevention policies adopted since the mid-1980s.”
Sadly, though the vast bulk of the cases happened back then, it was the failure to deal with the problem that has done the Boy Scouts in. Those were years, both for the Catholic Church and for the Boy Scouts, in which it was more important to maintain an outward facade of clean-living than it was to deal with the problem. And so, the problem was swept under the rug, only to surface later in a much worse iteration. Jesus spoke about the Pharisees being white-washed tombs, white on the outside but full of corruption on the inside. Make no mistake about it, it is the inner corruption that has caused problems for the Boy Scouts.
Then, of course, the Boy Scouts worsened the issue by beginning to take in girls. Not only did this anger the Girl Scouts, which responded with charges of poaching, but it also angered their largest group of supporters, the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Their withdrawal has severely hurt the organization. Now what is left is a vastly changed organization. On the good side, the number of abuse cases is now negligible. On the negative side, they have lost the support of more than one of their main base, the churches of America.
Overseas, several countries do have Scouting as a mixed organization of boys and girls. So, why has it caused such an upheaval in the USA? I think the answer is simply that Scouting leadership has been failing to listen to its stakeholders for a while now and thus is experiencing what any volunteer organization experiences when it fails to listen to its stakeholders. Volunteers are free to leave and now they are leaving in droves.
Would I recommend the Boy Scouts to a grandchild of mine? Sadly, no, and for various reasons. At this point, with the periodic and semi-constant changes in the American Boy Scout movement since about 2012, I do not know what I would be recommending nor could I guarantee my grandchild that the organization he or she would join would be the same organization several years down the line.
Leave a Reply