[Vision2020] The ‘Perversion Files’ Come to Light

[Art Deco]

 *NY Times:*
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Editorial The ‘Perversion Files’ Come to Light Published: October 19, 2012

The Boy Scouts of America has known for nearly a century that scout leaders
were preying on boys under the its protection. Yet for most of those long
years, it kept what it knew about scout leaders who were sexual predators
locked away in secret “perversion files.”
The Scouts’ excuse was that the files, compiled at least since the 1920s,
were a system of internal controls, to ensure that known abusers could not
rejoin scouting. No doubt this helped to protect many boys, but in many
other instances the system failed, and it kept failing. The Scouts had no
right to protect these criminals from the police, from parents and even
from many troop leaders. They serve as yet another example of the disaster
of institutional secrecy, of the danger when officials decide that an
organization deserves protecting more than a child.

Now a light is finally being shined on the Boy Scouts’ failure — not
because the institution had a change of heart, but because of orders from
judges. In the latest case, in Portland, Ore., a law firm that won an $18.5
million civil judgment in an abuse case fought all the way to the Oregon
Supreme Court to make public the “perversion files,” also known as the
“ineligible volunteer” files.

It posted a cache of them online <http://www.kellyclarkattorney.com/> on
Thursday. The files cover the period from 1965 to 1985, more than 15,000
pages detailing accusations against 1,247 scout leaders. In a separate case
dating to the 1980s, a Sacramento lawyer persuaded a judge to order the
release of another trove of files; an index of those cases, involving
nearly 1,900 accused abusers from 1971 to 1991, was shared with The Los
Angeles Times last year and has also been posted online<http://kosnoff.com/>.


Some of the records seem to show scouting officials trying to rid
themselves of abusers. But others, as Kirk Johnson of The Times reported on
Friday, betray secretiveness and negligence. “I would like to let this case
drop,” one executive said. “My personal opinion in this particular case is,
‘If it don’t stink, don’t stir it.’” Still others show that the “ineligible
volunteer” file system could be ineffective, if not useless. In 1981, a
Colorado man who had three sons in scouting warned that a scoutmaster named
Joe, who had abused his sons and others, had re-emerged at a Boy Scout
jamboree. “Your assurances that Joe was out of scouting and would have no
further contact with scouting have just become meaningless,” he wrote.

The Boy Scouts say they have adopted many strong reforms and are now a
model for effectiveness in protecting children, which may be true. But for
that, parents and scouts can thank the courage of victims and the
persistence of lawyers and journalists, not the goodwill of an organization
that minimized the problem and fought tenaciously for decades to keep its
secrets hidden.

The files are surely the tip of an iceberg, says Gilion
Dumas<http://www.kellyclarkattorney.com/category/blog/>,
a lawyer with the firm that posted the Oregon files, because the Boy Scouts
kept no records on how many files were created or lost and because many
cases were never reported, since most families, troops and sponsoring
organizations had no idea the files existed, or how to use them.

*For an organization that extols trustworthiness, these files lay bare an
appalling dissonance. The Boy Scouts battled to the Supreme Court to
protect their right to purge gay and lesbian leaders and to exclude gay
boys, insisting that openly gay people were bad role models. It bent to
bigotry while hiding sexual predators. *


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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