In the highly publicized lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America, a local Scout executive has testified that he believes the parents of the abused scouts are to blame. The AP wire service reported that Eugene Grant, President of the Portland metro area Scout’s Council, testified he thinks that the parents of the boys who were abused were negligent and even criminally responsible for the abuse by allowing their sons to attend sleepovers at a former scout master’s home. Grant told the jury that the parents should have known better than to allow their sons to spend the night in a single man’s apartment. He also testified that the Scouts did not have a policy prohibiting unauthorized sleepovers in the 1980s. Grant told the jury that he does not think the Cascade Pacific Council is responsible for any of the abuse.
It amazes me that a leader of this organization can cast stones at the victims’ parents and at the same time deny that the Boy Scouts are in any way responsible for what happened to these children. If Grant thinks that the parents were negligent for allowing their young boys to spend the night at the defendant’s apartment, how can he deny that the Boy Scout Council was negligent when the council was aware of allegations of abuse by this scout master and yet continued to send these same boys into the woods with this pedophile for overnight camping and hiking? Who was in a better position to suspect abuse? Parents who had no knowledge of any abuse allegations or the Scout Council who had received complaints of abuse?
As I mentioned in my earlier post on this case, the court has ruled that the victim’s lawyers can use the Boy Scout’s secret files, known as “the Perversion Files,” to try and prove a pattern by Scout officials of ignoring suspected abuse or allowing pedophiles to return to their leadership roles. Such evidence would be compelling and might well lead to a substantial punitive damages verdict against the Scout organization. Most other lawsuits filed against the Scouts for sexual abuse have settled out of court.
So far, since the jury trial began on March 17, the victim’s lawyer has opened up six large boxes filled with over 20,000 pages of files the Boy Scouts of America maintained on over 1,000 national volunteers who sexually abused boys between 1965 and 1984. The victim’s lawyers have not shown the jury a file connected to the defendant in this case, but I would not be surprised if that file is the last one introduced into evidence. That would be a strong way to end the case.
At Davis Law Group, we believe that all organizations that take on the responsibility of caring for and supervising children have a duty to protect those children from abusers. This seems like a very common sense concept, yet there are still dozens of youth organizations that have not adopted any policies about how to make sure abuse does not happen within their organization. Failing to adopt such anti-abuse policies can lead to abuse. If you are a parent whose child or children belong to youth organizations, whether in church, school or athletics, you should ask the leaders of those organizations about their policies for preventing sexual abuse. If they have no policies, then you should decline to have your child involved in that organization. To learn more about child sexual abuse prevention, visit Darkness to Light.