Chapter 11 Announced - Part 5 - RSA Ruling

[PeterHopkins]

8 minutes ago, MattR said:

What I've learned is that when it comes to trauma like this, where someone that society says you should be loyal to and yet they traumatize you anyway, it's next to impossible for the victim to walk away. Whether it's parents abusing kids, spousal abuse, CSA, or even war, this seems to be the crux of the pain. My understanding is that parts of our brains, the older parts, are wired towards loyalty towards community. So that part of the brain is keeping the victim from leaving the situation. The newer parts of the brain, including the parts that control reason and speech, you might think would just say "hey, this is a bad situation, leave!" but the two parts don't really talk to each other very well. Consequently there's a huge tension, words and reasoning don't work, and the result is PTSD and all the things we've been told about by the victims on this forum. My impression is that a compassionate community is probably the biggest type of help for the victims. The trauma makes a lot of changes in the brain and, again, just my impression, but it takes a lot of effort to rewire the brain.

From experience, I can say that parents abusing their children is different from the other situations you mention. When the abuse and neglect span an entire childhood, the child first has to reach an age where s/he as another reference point. Until then, the child sees the abuse as a normal part of growing up. By then, the chilkd has been conditioned to believe s/he is the cause of the abuse. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to break free of that. I didn't even start trying until I was 41.

[CynicalScouter]

I believe the overall point and certainly the points in the lawsuits filed are twofold and I’ll offer a third:

1) BSA National knew from very early on it had a child sexual abuse problem, thus the creation of what became the IV files as early as 1920 was an acknowledgement of the problem.

2) That when confronted with the sheer volume of instances of child sexual abuse, BSA opted to hide it, underplay it, and failed to take steps needed to weed it out. We can see for example in BSAs own internal reviews where even their own “safety” expert was not allowed access, leading him to say user oath more scouts had downed than been sexually abused which top BSA officials knew was a lie.

3) BSA relied far too heavily for far too long on the fiction that COs were exercising any kind of oversight of those units.

So, it wasn’t “BSA had no safety plans in place.” They did. They were just lousy and horrible.

Edited August 29, 2021 by CynicalScouter

[Life]

If this is the wrong place for this please forgive and redirect. 
I see some speak of their significant others in here and as a fellow survivor I understand the difficulty of having a romantic relationship. I’ve not been all that great at it. I wonder how you have been able to pull of this extraordinary task. That was a merit badge I was unable to attain. I like to think I have come a long ways in personal growth as it pertains to surviving, but as I step into a new venture with a lady I feel the old stuff come in. It gets cloudy at best. 
just curious. I feel comfortable putting this here because it is a part of what is. 

[CynicalScouter]

@Muttsyposted this but I really think it needs to be reiterated here: BSA top officials KNEW they had a child sex abuse problem and hid it from even their own folks.

Patrick Boyle's 1992 book Scouts Honor is essential reading to understand how it all came to this. It was the institutional instinct to conceal, minimize and deny. 

 

"By dealing with  these cases as a series of unrelated events rather than as a pattern, the Boy Scouts of America was  behaving  just  like  Carl:  minimizing,  rationalizing, assuring itself it had no problem. "The Scouts believed their own image. They believed their own publicity," says Mike Rothschild, a California attorney who represented an abused Scout.34

No  one,  therefore,  reported  the  cases  to the  BSA's health and safety committee, which routinely got reports on injuries  and deaths  at Scout  functions.  When Scouts got hurt or killed while boating, the committee developed rules to make boating safer. During America's Bicentennial cel­ ebrations, the committee  studied  whether  the gunpowder used by troops in some ceremonial muskets was dangerous. But Dr. Walter Menninger, a psychiatrist  who headed the Menninger Foundation in Kansas and who chaired the committee, says he did not believe sex abuse was a problem in Scouting because no one had informed him of any cases.

Thus uninformed, Menninger sat in a 1987 deposition for lawsuit filed by an abused Scout and declared, "There is a greater threat to Scouts of drowning and loss of life from accidents than there is from sexual abuse by a Scoutmaster."

In fact, BSA reports show that sex abuse is more common in Scouting than deaths or serious injuries. From 1971 through 1990, an average of 13 Scouts died during Scout activities each year, and 30 suffered serious injuries, defined by the Scouts as life-threatening or requiring hospitalization of at least 24 hours." For each of those years, however, the BSA banned an average of 67 adults suspected of abusing Scouts." The number of their victims is higher although there is no exact figure. Even without knowing this, Menninger's committee tried to grapple with sex abuse. Committee members wanted to educate Scouts about abuse or teach leaders how to respond when a boy said he'd been abused. Here they ran into a roadblock: religion. Religion is a cornerstone of Scouting. Reverence to God is in the Scout Law, and about half of the sponsors of Scout units are religious organizations, mostly churches.. The BSA could ill afford to offend them. Menninger, noting the "exquisitely sensitive nature of the relationship" between the corporation and sponsors, explains the dilemma: "There are a number of sponsoring organizations, particularly the LDS Church, the Mormon Church, that have made it quite clear they want the Scouting, outing, advancement programs as part of their youth program, but they want issues of moral, sexual aspects to be strictly part of the church's teaching."Churches, Menninger says, "have a  substantial percentage of registration [of Scouts1and become a much more potent factor." As a result, the BSA "focused away from some of these specific sexual areas."

[David CO]

9 minutes ago, PeterHopkins said:

yout participants

I watched My Cousin Vinny, so I knew that's how you New Yorkers pronounce it.  I just didn't know you spelled it that way, too.  

[MikeS72]

12 minutes ago, johnsch322 said:

So how did at least 2 abusers get into my troop?  How was one of them able to go to another state and allowed to apply and only when his name found was his application denied?  Only god knows what the second person was able to continue doing.  
I think that the imperators in your reply is “expected”.  Judging by the size of the perversion files this was not routinely carried out. 

So how did at least 2 abusers get into my troop? - Did either have family in your troop?  Were either former youth members of the troop?  Not knowing the time frame, could also have been due to not having the background check system now in place; or could also have been due to having no prior record to show in a background check.  Could also have been a case of a CoR just signing off on them without checking references.  (although they would have to have been exceptionally stupid to list someone as a reference who would have incriminating information on them)

How was one of them able to go to another state and allowed to apply and only when his name found was his application denied?  Was the abuse reported to law enforcement?  If he was able to go to another state and try to register there, probably not.  If not brought to law enforcement there would have been nothing to prevent him from trying to register elsewhere, although his application being denied at least shows being in the IVF helped prevent him from hurting someone else.

I know that there were times when parents did not want law enforcement involved, due the the stigma that would be associated if the abuse were made public.  (while child sex abuse victims should never be made public, I now of at least one instance where name was published; I cannot remember the exact age, but I believe he was 15/16, and the abuser was a school teacher)  Sometimes law enforcement got involved and the District Attorney, for whatever reason, did not bring charges.  That should not be blamed on BSA, but on the DA.  I am sure that there were also cases where a troop., district or council allowed people to walk away with no other repercussions.  That should never have been allowed to happen.

[Muttsy]

16 hours ago, ThenNow said:

Yes. You’re right. I am admittedly an outlier. I was not a survivor who was geared/teed/lawyered up in state court and I didn’t see a single ad or solicitation

The solicitation to all survivors in all states was cooked up long before Feb 2020. Stang was talking with Andolina for more than a year prior AND getting paid by BSA, to boot. I recall in an early filing BSA reported having paid Stang several hundred thousand dollars pre-filing.

Stang was fully in bed with BSA staring lovingly in to each other’s eyes. One of the items of their pillow talk was how to ensure BSA et al got nation-wide immunity. That could only be done in Ch 11 if BSA ran a nation-wide noticing/solicitation program. This was fully baked in many months before the bk was filed  The judge had nothing to do with it  It was an agreed order and she signed off on it  Remember her multiple 5% comments at the last hearing, how she only ever knows more than 5% of what’s going on in the cases in her court? She didn’t know and wouldn’t care  Ch 11 is a commercial let’s make a deal court  If the parties agree and it’s mostly within the bounds of the code and rules she could care less  This is not a real court fellas  

Doubt me? Ask Stang at the next Town Hall assuming there ever is one again  

Andolina/Laurie thought Stang’s connections to some of the lawyers representing clients with pending lawsuits or claims would enable them to do a pre-packaged bankruptcy with maybe 500 claims, a super short bar date, modest advertising budget, quick and dirty, in and out. But then out of nowhere came this tsunami which called itself AIS with thousands of clients and wrecked the party. 
 

 

[PeterHopkins]

30 minutes ago, David CO said:

I watched My Cousin Vinny, so I knew that's how you New Yorkers pronounce it.  I just didn't know you spelled it that way, too.  

So, I went back and corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.

I recall as a Scout, the adults in my Brooklyn troop would frequently use the words ute or utes in conversation when referring to us. If a matter requiring decision arose, one of them might say, "We should let the utes decide." We actually called them "the men", and they used that term too. I remember one noticing we were getting too close to some prepared food yelling, "That food is for the men, not for the ute members."

They would say, "Everything we do is for the utes," as they settled down for their alcohol-fueled Saturday-night poker game. Different standards at that time. Today's utes just would not understand.

Anyone can see where I grew up by watching the opening and closing credits of Welcome Back, Kotter on youtube. I was a block away from the elevated subway tracks shown there, it ran 24 hours a day, and you could hear it all night, when other noises weren't present. The high school shown there was less than a 10-minute walk from where I lived. It isn't really called Buchanan as in the show; it's called New Utrecht. I didn't go there.

The street and subway scenes from Saturday Night Fever are also familiar sights from my childhood. At least as of late last year, Lenny's Pizza is still there. The elevated subway tracks in the background are the West End Line, the same shown in Welcome Back, Kotter.

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by PeterHopkins
add info

[CynicalScouter]

19 minutes ago, Muttsy said:

Remember her multiple 5% comments at the last hearing, how she only ever knows more than 5% of what’s going on in the cases in her court?

Let me clarify something: litigation whether it is civil or probate or bankruptcy is 90-95% outside of a courtroom. A judge does not get involved in the day by day elements of the litigation. For example if two parties in civil litigation are in talks to settle and exchanging letters and offers back and forth only the lawyers would know; the judge does not get cc’ed.

In New York State courts for example it is standard practice NOT to even assign a judge to a civil case UNTIL the parities reach an impasse or need a judge’s order for something at which point one side files what is called a Request for Judicial Intervention.

https://nycourts.gov/forms/rji/UCS-840-fillable.pdf

So when she said that she only knew about 5% of what was going on in the case THAT is what she meant. She is not reading the hours and hours of mediation hearing transcripts or the back and forth of emails and discovery requests, etc.

Edited August 29, 2021 by CynicalScouter

[CynicalScouter]

17 minutes ago, Muttsy said:

If the parties agree and it’s mostly within the bounds of the code and rules she could care less  This is not a real court fellas  

And as someone who has worked for law firms and worked as a court employee and sat as a civil case manger for tens of thousands of state court cases I assure you: that is standard practice in every state court in the US and happens in “Real courts” every day.

if the parties agree to something as a stipulated order the judge will determine whether or not the order is consistent with rules and statutes in question. Only in the rarest circumstances will a judge not agree to a stipulated order that all parties have agreed to.

Edited August 29, 2021 by CynicalScouter

[Muttsy]

17 hours ago, ThenNow said:

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by Muttsy
Error

[David CO]

20 minutes ago, PeterHopkins said:

They would say, "Everything we do is for the utes," as they settled down for their alcohol-fueled Saturday-night poker game. 

I hope the men didn't review and approve the adult leader applications at these alcohol-fueled Saturday-night poker games.  

I fear that some scout leaders may have been chosen for their ability to socialize with the adults rather than their skill at leading boys.

Edited August 29, 2021 by David CO

[Muttsy]

3 minutes ago, CynicalScouter said:

And as someone who has worked for law firms and worked as a court employee and sat as a civil case manger for tens of thousands of state court cases I assure you: that is standard practice in every state court in the US and happens in “Real courts” every day

That may be true but it is not analogous when a judge is entering orders that affect the rights of thousands of non-parties and ruling on motions without being adequately “advised in the premises.”

[CynicalScouter]

4 minutes ago, Muttsy said:

That may be true but it is not analogous when a judge is entering orders that affect the rights of thousands of non-parties and ruling on motions without being adequately “advised in the premises.”

You say she wasn’t adequately advised I’m sure she’d say that she was.

There were no fewer than four different hearings regarding the solicitation document and process.

The idea that the solicitation and notification process was simply a stipulated motion that the TCC and BSA entered into with no hearings no briefing and no objections isn’t true.

Edited August 29, 2021 by CynicalScouter

[SiouxRanger]

Has Steven Scheid's April 28, 2021 article in United Methodist Insight been noted or discussed here?

https://um-insight.net/in-the-church/local-church/sexual-abuse-in-um-scout-troops-is-nearly-non-existent-let-s/

One paragraph particularly caught my attention:

The fact that one in six males have been sexually abused increases the perception that there must be thousands of incidents of sexual abuse within Scout units. However, the cumulative rate of reported sexual abuse within United Methodist sponsored units over the past ten years is 0.001 percent. With more than 300,000 youth involved annually, there were only three claims. Of course, even one incident is too many.

Is this correct?