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Okay. Answer me this. How does ending a charter agreement absolve a CO of liability? Is there any victims’ attorney out there who said they will take a CO off their list of intended targets if they drop a charter?

Chatting with a scout dad last night … ”I only made it to 1st class, or was it star?” ”Did you have fun?” ”Oh, yeah!”

First the titles are pure doublespeak. BSA has often formed these under different names. A recent was the information technology group. They made a big show of wanting to recruit volunteers throughout the nation. I have the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” on that one. I don’t know how many there are or were.

Or, possibly there was potential for worse abuse in band, and your son was needed there to prevent that. God’s grace has it’s quirks … I’m wondering if this is related to a similar story we were following a few years back. I’ll have to dig.

Let me ease your mind. There will be no global resolution at the CO level. A victim might have a chance of forcing a CO with a large number of accumulated assets to the table. The odds increase with the number of victims. So, I would give you high odds with your Catholic CO of exacting something because the diocese will most likely hold the liability. Going after a volunteer fire department in a distressed community? A few now-impoverished friends who hosted a scouting group for a few years then disbanded? With no liability coverage? A victim might get more with a tin cup. Think of it this way: if COs were estimated to have had consolidated wealth much larger than BSA's, where do you think legal action would have started in the first place.

Son #2's best friend, as he advanced into adulthood, made the conscious decision to no longer be considered as having Asperger's Syndrome. It's not been easy for the young man. But, for him, "fighting that label" gave him a lot of courage. I don't know if, as a scout, I would have been willing to be an Arab American "object of study." I might have been able to say, "Come over for dinner." It wasn't until college (and even after) that I realized that it's sometimes helpful to be a foil against which people could sound out their experience of being discriminated against (or a discriminator). I do know that these conversations among adults sometimes disappoint because nobody is a perfect metaphor for someone else's troubles, but it's really easy to come of like you're trying to be just that. If you're going to counsel this badge, you're going to have to accept that you can only do so much to prepare a scout for it.

My relatives in FL put wheels on their patrol’s Klondike derby sled. Most district events at the troop level should encourage patrol competitions, IMHO.

Regarding obtuse references: This is an open forum. As long as it’s not ad hominem, a poster can be pretty free with their style. Other concepts are elaborated in Forum Support. If something is unclear, ask, and the first one to provide an answer might get an upvote. (Some folks desire them.) About yachts and other expensive hobbies, I daresay that some victims have them, or have friends who do. If Mr. Kosnoff thinks that a night on the water is such an insult to a lawyer’s clients, he could take it up with the Bar Association.

@Eagle94-A1, consider how many EMTs are in an ambulance. It’s not for youth protection. We’ve always sent two adults to transport a scout to clinic.

One man’s loophole = another man’s knot. “No one-on-one contact” is not a loophole so much as it’s the means by which scouts can corroborate evidence of sexual abuse should it occur.

Interesting article on cannabis vaping among youth … https://text.npr.org/1049127183 If you’re recruiting evenly in your community it’s likely that one in 12 of your youth are dealing with this.

@yknot, this summer we had several registered adults attend our council’s summer camp. Two deep, check. One evening, I shadowed two scouts on their first orienteering course. No one-on-one contact, check. To work the course, we had to check in at the program hall and sign out and in. This confirmed that we were maintaining YP per current standards. Plus, it made it easy to log our time. This is the proper and correct interpretation of the G2SS.

Thanks. Will catch up when WIFi improves. Doesn’t anybody do plain text releases anymore?

If you have enough trusted adults to buddy up all the time, do it. It’s not just about YPT. Stupid happens fast, and adults are not exempt from my axiom. A buddy helps mitigate the impact of accidents. Plus, it’s a great way to get to know your fellow adults. On the other hand, put little faith in that system. Two adults could conspire to put live-feed cameras in a shower house … or do worse. I’d rather one adult of integrity in his/her hammock keeping one eye on some scouts than have two sketchy adults with evil designs having time to scheme.

How about if no predator is screened, but a number of parents — not trusting their kids to summer camp with the only two registered leaders available from their unit — do not attend, but rather form their own club but instead camp on a relative’s cabin in Canada (which would not require any RCMP clearance), who hosts them and begins grooming an erstwhile scout or two? My answer is don’t broker in hypotheticals without a devil’s advocate. I don’t believe BSA has looked at all of the CSA data when making the 72 hour rule. I bet there aren’t a lot of instances of abuse by some other kid’s non-registered parent on weekend campouts. But, I bet there are a large number of injury suits by parents who weren’t at camp when an incident happened. Furthermore, I’m more than just guessing that a lot of 71-hour-or-less cub resident camps had something to say in the matter.

@Eagle1993, I’m afraid statistics regarding male vs. female perpetrators are rapidly changing. I don’t want to dis any other youth organizations, but from staff who’ve worked in female exclusive camps, I’ve learned that reigning in grooming/abuse is a challenge. Maybe it’s because when one multiplies 1/5 of perpetrators being female by young females being 3 to 6 times more likely to be victims it doesn’t decrease female youth’s risk of assault in a camp governed mostly by female adults. (And I let my daughter hang out with college students when she was a youth. It was a net positive. I have to admit that I didn’t map out the risks very well.) So, from my perspective all parents need to be vetted equally.

First, let’s be clear that “un-registered” does not equate to “without child abuse clearance.” Worse, most parents, given stricter requirements, would complete their application just before departing for camp. I doubt their clearances would go through instantly. Therefore, until systems are tightened, “registered” will not equal “cleared” for most purposes. Although PA’s clearance laws ease the burden of screening, I don’t get comfort from them. A malefactor can do a lot in the five year gap between filings. Secondly, in other youth-facing projects, we still welcome being accountable to parents while keeping one eye open lest they assume roles towards other youth that they should not. Fresh eyes on the way we do things seems to do more good and little, if no, harm. Thirdly, scouting happens, with or without BSA. Parents who don’t want to bother with paperwork are simply taking their kids camping elsewhere. State parks, friends’ hunting camps, and relatives’ farms abound. I am very concerned about the youth losing access to havens that are ten times as likely to protect them from exposure to abuse. The harsh reality is that, rather than getting a bunch of cleared parents in every unit at camp, we’ll get more units with only two adults spending the night with our scouts. That just sounds like a recipe for unintended consequences. The real issue: how do we get from tenfold less risk to hundredfold? Should we background-check parents as they register their kids? If they aren’t cleared, we would then need a contingency plan for helping them monitor their child’s safety. But, cleared parents would provide one less hurdle to feeling comfortable with them camping with our kids.

To be very clear … BSA allows parents to observe the activities of scouts and their registered adult leaders during routine overnights. This imposes increased accountability on the minimum 2 registered adult leaders. It’s a welcome thing. Do these TCC lawyers have proof that this is the source of most abuse in the past few years? Or, would they rather put our youth at increased risk for the sake of rhetoric?

If DE&I works for our youth, the net result will be scouts intentionally befriending and recruiting youth from outside their peer circle(s) or starting units in undeserved neighborhoods, and scouts prepared to work anywhere in this country, live in any neighborhood, and/or start their small business with the best partners -- not necessarily the ones who share a common background. Now, that is completely different than BSA's immediate needs. They need executives who will work for very little in exchange for feeling as though they are part of a "family" that nurtures them and provides professional growth. That family includes us scouters. And I have seen scouters in my area come along-side minority DE's and help their personal growth -- not just because that's what we'd do for any young DE, but because we could tell that they felt "out of the loop" and needed to know we cared. So, I sort of get where BSA's going with this. But let's not fool ourselves. It's not all sentimental. There's real money to be had by having a minority community adopt your program, and there's lots of real money to lose if staff or volunteers treat minority employees badly. A lot of the board members have shored up their businesses by savvy HR decisions that sometimes included getting the word out regarding their DE&I policies to everyone involved with their corporation -- employees, contractors, and clients. Maybe there's a CRT gremlin to chase down here and there, but much of DE&I is straight-up capitalism.

No, “jaded” is the correct word. What we need to desperately know is relative risk. In other words, it’s not enough to know what are the odds of an insult (and consequently, injury) from a given activity. But we need to know — especially when it comes to securing the safety of our youth — if that is more or less dangerous than any other activity. For example, removal of scout camps will certainly put more youth and adults at increased risk of auto accidents (and concomitant injury/death). What we don’t know, however, is if substituting that activity for drives to soccer games and sports camp now has lower risks. So, we build up our risk model based on our experience. Do we see our COR checking references? Are only registered (and therefore, in PA, vetted) adults camping with our youth? Are suspicions dealt with promptly? Are other groups that youth are involved in more lax? You were blessed with fellow scouts who weren’t sex-obsessed. I wasn’t. But since that was also the norm in sports, band, and youth group in my time, I put up with it. Fortunately my SPL and SM would not and things got better as some scouts left and new ones moved up. I was pleasantly surprised that my sons’ troops and my daughter’s crew tended to be free of that. But, I noticed certain social media patterns that I would nip in the bud by talking to parents. (Or, if either of my kids were pushing boundaries, I would call him/her on it.) Given that all of that was beyond the reach of any professional staff, I never trusted National to help me much in keeping my youth safe. So, yes, I look askance at rhetoric promising to make things better by bludgeoning BSA into some “new, improved” scouting model. I’d be happy if they succeed on that point. But they haven’t promised to measure success in any rigorous, scientific, way that includes controlled comparison groups.

In fact, the event was not dismissed. At least not by BSA. Before it ever reached council, the school principal and the police had deemed it to not be an actionable offense. I only got a call about it from my director of field service because the parent finally reported it to council. Everyone else but BSA had determined to do nothing. So, no, my experience doesn’t jib with the picture you are trying to paint. The lack of transparency, however, does not tell me if this is the norm or, as you wish to assert, the exception.

Actually, yes. I dealt with an instance of a parent calling that CSA. I’m certain that I’m not the first person to face that situation.

“A predator would prefer to lurk in my troop.” Is one more of many reasons for someone like me to stay in scouting. We are all jaded by our experience. The adult relatives and associates who came forward about their CSA, suffered their insults outside of scouting. BSA provided me and my kids a safe haven relative to many other places where I learned CSA was happening. Increased transparency (which I favor) and reporting to independent auditors (a definite plus), although helpful, won’t tell us if an organization’s YP is improving or worsening. But, understanding those risks relative to risks in other sectors would help us all. There was mention of PA’s clearance requirements for all volunteers with youth. One important consequence was that maybe 3/4 of our area’s leaders let their registration lapse the year that policy rolled out. It was a bit tough at first (e.g., the paperwork burden to get an international scout to be a volunteer discouraged his participation), but with a narrower pool of volunteers, I do have fewer adults to track.

This is a very, very, dark road that this frame of mind proposes to send the nation's youth down. All one needs to do is substitute "patrol method" for "nuclear family" and we've sanctioned the state's removal of children from parents to "prevent" whatever ill-effects some classes of parents may have on their offspring. The fundamental problem: no matter how one dredges for cases in one sector, one fails to prove anything. Mainly because one hasn't dredged other institutions, including nuclear families, in the same way. So what if cases are reduced by 1/2 or 3/4? If the trend nationwide is decreasing in the same manner, one would be hard pressed to credit some internal policy change. Another harsh reality: if we really want to promote transparent reporting, we have to remove the threat of litigation. More carrots, fewer sticks.

All this depends on what you consider BSA's mission is regarding camps. If camps are a profit center ... sort of a "shelter" from legal assaults ... to be used to for supporting professional staff, then that's a pretty self-serving mission and LC's could certainly do better by downsizing program and charging fees for other services. This will inevitably put a financial burden on membership, but could make for leaner more efficient LC's. If camps are a community service and conservation resource, then selling them off would undermine BSA's public responsibility. I've seen multiple organizations use ours ... they are sometimes preferred to state and county parks. Some of the reasons for (scouts and outside organizations) choosing our camps include better protections from abuse. This is all perception. I'm sure no studies have been done to determine the locations of a victim's grooming and abuse. But, should they succeed in their negotiations, victims would be hard pressed to pool their awards to build camps where CSA would be reported publicly and found to occur at a much lower rate than general population. More importantly, every hour that a youth spends on the road to summer camp is one more hour at risk for their life. So, giving up camps is not merely lost revenue, or one less "back-roads promotion opportunity." It's a sense (valid or not) that doing so will harm nation's youth on multiple levels.