Boy Scouts sex abuse scandal in US sheds light on 44-year-old case at Rota base

[xchrom]

http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/12/28/inenglish/1356720856_024803.html


A major US court inquiry into sexual abuse charges that allegedly took place over the years by supervisors and volunteers at Boy Scouts of America has for the first time disclosed details about a 44-year-old case in which a scoutmaster at Rota Naval Station in Cádiz was accused of molesting underage boys while serving as an officer there.

The 28-page report on the Rota incidents is only a small sampling of the more than 3,200 confidential case files compiled throughout the years by Boy Scouts officials, but made public on December 25 through a database set up by the Los Angeles Times.

The majority of the internal sexual abuse investigations on scoutmasters, volunteers and other supervisors detailed in the files, and which date back to the late 1940s, focus on complaints in cities and communities across the United States. But scandalous dossiers on similar incidents involving scout officials were also gathered across Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean during this period.

Boy Scouts collected the data for its own private use, mainly to identify offenders and keep them from re-applying for positions in other communities. But the documents also support long-held notions that scout officials in many cases never reported the incidents to local authorities while safeguarding them in what they termed “the confidential file.”

[HillWilliam]

1. It's so sad to think

that like the RCC, the Boy Scouts were far more interested in self-preservation and the financial bottom line than the lives and well-being of the children whose innocence was stolen away from them.

Both institutions deserve to be ground into dust for that. A child only gets to be a child for a limited time at best. To have someone to steal that is bad enough. To have legions behind the predator to cover up the crime is mind-blowing.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. Beyond that,

what is it about this phenomenon that makes these male-only organizations behave in this way? i.e. going to ridiculous lengths to cover up for the accused? And putting the reputation of their institutions a whole in jeopardy by so doing.

At some level you have to recognize that they ( members of the organizational high command) are deeply sympathetic to the accused. But why? Couldn't they get away with just dismissing the perp as "homosexual" whether or not that's what you or I would consider him to be? ( For instance, I'd consider him, if guilty, a *pedophile* not "gay", a term we generally reserve for adults who are interested sexually/romantically in other adults) And then cast him loose. That would at least be consistent with their policy and relentlessly hostile rhetoric re. homosexuality as a social issue

But they hang on to these guys, covering up, and then covering-up the cover-ups; and then the cover-ups of the cover-ups of the cover-ups.

I don't get it.

[Vanje]

3. I read through the boyscout abuse files from mid 1960s

in Portland, Or, where I grew up.

I read the name of my abuser there.

It wasnt JUST boys who suffered from B.S.A.'s cover ups of pedophiles in their organization.

I was an 8 year old pig-tailed little girl.