No doubt attorney Mitchell Garabedian was not stunned to learn of the thousands of local Boy Scouts who filed suit against the Boy Scouts national organization. He’s representing men from Boston and throughout the state — part of the more than 92,000 men nationwide who say they were sexually abused as scouts.
This is familiar awful territory for Garabedian whose life’s work has been representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Garabedian described the Boy Scouts’ “culture of abuse” telling GBH News, “The Boy Scouts of America did not properly supervise these Boy Scout leaders who sexually abused innocent children.”
I didn’t know the extent of the now documented four-decades-long sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts, but I began to get a sense of how widespread it could be when I continued to see those TV alerts urging sexually abused victims to come forward. The deadline — part of the organization’s bankruptcy — was two weeks ago today. The youngest filer is eight and the oldest is 93. The Boy Scouts of America responded to the thousands of lawsuits in a statement, “We are heartbroken that we cannot undo their pain.”
That statement rings hollow now that I know how long the national organization kept silent. They collected allegations and letters from the 1960s through the 1990s in what later became known as the "Perversion Files." Oregon lawyers won the right to make those files public in 2012. What the accusers reported then is similar to what recent former boy scouts also reported: forced naked swimming, late night fondling in camp tents, threats not to tell. Some of the accused went to jail but most paid no price for traumatizing their young charges. Meanwhile, those boys turned men spent a lifetime trying to push down the memories of the sexual abuse — many of them battling addiction and mental health issues.
I’m infuriated when I think about this criminal behavior going on while the Boy Scouts held fast to a policy banning gay boys until seven years ago and gay troop leaders until the year after. And as enrollment sharply dropped, the Boy Scouts began a cynical rebranding campaign inviting girls into the scouts’ formerly all-male ranks. I knew it was a calculated move to balance their books. And I’m disgusted that an organization mired in accusations of abuse and maintaining hidden perversion files recruited young girls — potentially setting them up to be the next victims.
As a Boy Scout, Maryland resident Larry Akers would have had to recite the Scout Oath, where he pledged to be “morally straight.” He recited that oath while being sexually violated by the troop leaders. Akers told the Washington Post that for most of his life he blunted his pain by using alcohol and drugs. Now sober, he said of the recent revelations, ”Everybody knows. America knows.”
But knowledge isn’t enough. Action is required, accountability is required, punishment is required. Shockingly, the number of total Boy Scout sexual abuse cases is already bigger than the abuse cases in the Catholic church. Mitchell Garabedian is likely to be busy for a very long while.
