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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.

American parents often want lots of details, and the announcements for both Jamborees are pretty sparse. Here’s how I informed my troop. (Iin case you are looking to do something similar for your scouts, feel free to use. No point in reinventing the wheel.)

There was an official announcement. Your sources are correct. And that is the website to get on the mailing list. World Scout Jamboree opens shortly after National Jamboree closes. There’s no hard-and-fast rule that Jambos have to be on opposite did-numbered years. Each scheduling strategy has advantages and disadvantages.

So, when did BSA have troops with mixed races? Sometime before 1919: https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2021/03/24/new-research-reveals-an-even-earlier-black-eagle-scout-hamilton-bradley-of-new-york/. Let us not forget that this is a big country, the black experience has never followed a single narrative, and the strategies BSA deployed to reckon with varied accordingly. But to the OP, scouts can and do attend and speak at town meetings in uniform. From time to time, those events are noted here, and similar objections are raised. Invariably scouters conflate endorsing a political candidate with engaging in civil discourse at town meetings.

Although I may concur with the sentiment, it’s on par with purging the organization of atheists. You’ll never know who most of them are until they’ve done a world of good for your community’s youth.

Upon consideration, my gut says that these system-wide traces of YP statistics will disappoint. Whatever number comes out of them, it will either be deemed an under- or over-count, and their interpretation will be debatable. Most importantly, there's no control sample. But, equally important, there will be multiple sources of reporting bias. If the goal is to benchmark how well a program is being implemented and how safe kids are, we would do better with independent research using de-identified random sample surveys of scouts and alumni. Such controlled research will have power to actually nail down the rate of YP violations or CSA by asking tough questions, like: How frequently do scouts recall being 1-on-1 with leaders? How often have scouts experienced CSA? Was the perpertrator an youth, adult, relative, elder? Were they in scouting? In school? Some other venue? How often do scouts report CSA? How long after an incident do they take to report it? To whom do they report it? Similar questions could be asked of scouters. It's critical to get good data that can be compared to national norms. Otherwise, someone could claim their new YP program is working wonders when it's merely an artifact of national trends. E.g. the CDC's 2019 stats show CSA prevalence in males is down to 3.4%; and in females 11.1% (https://yrbs-explorer.services.cdc.gov/#/graphs?questionCode=H19&topicCode=C01&location=XX&year=2019 ). The 2021 survey will be especially interesting. But, beyond national norms, it's critical to answer questions of YP compliance and how that may correlate with CSA prevalence reduction. Until now, we (not just BSA, lots of youth-facing organizations) presumed that it did. This involves spending real $s for independent auditors who will guarantee methods and results will be published (and ultimately, peer-reviewed). A really well-executed survey may eventually fund itself as other organizations might want to purchase the same bench-marking service.

It's like those Arrowmen are evil twins to my Venturing. I am the guy in the troop who says, "Squirrel!" And that's why I stump that our goal is to imbue in youth a vision of the pinnacle scouting experience of hiking and camping independently with your mates.

I’ve put that burden on scouts who wanted a crew. I told them if they could bring me 5 buddies who weren’t in scouts, we’d get rolling. Yep, cover the twelve steps. That will get the DE involved. It will also build the mindset that you need. Regarding churches, they really need to be able to dedicate the space and provide a COR willing to give oversight.

Thanks @HelpfulTracks. The larger problem, I think, is that Eagle rank has been oversold. I fight this constantly in my troop. New parents come in and think that our troop is something special because some of us adults are Eagle Scouts. Meanwhile, the majority of other adults have put heart and soul into the life of the troop, helping us in countless ways. We Eagle Scouts don’t do all that much besides wear a nice knot. There’s a lot to be gained in taking pride in one’s advancement — be it Eagle or Tenderfoot. And it always breaks my heart when someone says, “I only earned [insert award that’s not Eagle here].” Drop the “only.” Remember your scouting career with pride!

What point diminishment? And wouldn’t the converse be true? If all a person can do is a point increment and nothing else, then that would not be contributing anything either. If it is true, shouldn’t you be aggressively asking someone to expound on why they might agree with you, if they haven’t taken the time to do so? Anyone who doesn’t see things the way I do, they are welcome to downvote. It means a lot to me. I won’t bully you for anything beyond that. I believe the only correct reply (if it didn’t clutter up the forum) would be, “Thank you for weighing in.” My apologies to anyone who expected that from me and didn’t get it. For those of you who’ve ever upvoted anything of mine, please consider getting professional help.

But, the CPC will be permitted to publish its own evaluation of changes (or lack of change), no? That alone could serve as an advisory to concerned parents. My biggest problem from a boots-on-the-ground perspective is that my parents aren't concerned. They think I and my SM's are saints. I am happy to say that we are worthy of a little elevation, just like the old Handbooks said. But parents should be raising the bar on us. A report from the CPC would go a long way to helping them understand that.

I thought I made clear, @David CO, that if it's just a paper Eagle story, it should stop there. But how would one troop know if it is just that? The political angle is a significant one where I live. Scout alumni in my district have been elected to public office. Scouters in my unit have run and are running for office (and even have their campaign signs on my property). If there was a hint of pretension in any of them, not only would they have my endorsement withdrawn, they would have my vocal opposition. If it were just me being a curmudgeon, I'm sure my observations would go nowhere. But, if someone in more than one or two other spheres also noted a cutting of corners ... it would amount to a lack of public confidence worth exploring. And, that's what reporters are for: to connect dots that we don't have time to observe.

I agree that the editor would not (and should not) publish a single letter regarding a single incident. However, it may be receiving reports of a pattern of incidents. The pattern could be regarding this one Eagle scout. (For example, he runs for office touting a prestigious resume. However, along with this evidence from the troop, the paper has on file a report of grade inflation, questionable signatures on a petition to be put on a ballot, etc ...) Or, it could be regarding multiple scouts. (E.g. -- this locality might have a spate of paper-pushing parents sweeping up accolades from multiple youth organizations. It might be a cultural phenomenon.) It could be that this council sweeps other things under the rug. (E.g. -- malfeasance with Eagle applications might also parallel a failure to report abuse to authorities.) Before taking such action, it is fair to consider that the troop might be in the wrong. Maybe they've raised such a high bar that paperwork moves ridiculously slow, and the scout and his parent felt they had no other choice but to seek help beyond his own unit. It could be that this troop is unique in its troubles; however, If @UpstateNYCC is accurate in the depiction of events, the troop might wrongly feel alone, isolated, and left out to dry by council. One way to break this cycle is to communicate to the Fourth Estate. To be clear, I would not want to do this. As a rule I've kept the press at a distance from matters involving scouts. And, if a reporter asks for some exclusive interview from your leadership about some written statement, decline. Your statement should speak for itself. (Yes, I've disappointed a reporter by saying just that. Still, the paper quoted the statement, and we all saved time.)