fred8033

The case I refer to was one I had in training. (?? 10/15 years ago??) Search for Karl in this document. He refers to his 500 incidents. That video was extremely eye opening. I was BSA used that training to open people's eyes. https://www.archmil.org/ArchMil/Resources/SAFE/3FacilitatorManual.pdf I was questioning the statistics. It seems different statistics apply to different categories. I'm not sure which statistics can be used when as applicable to this case. Perhaps, the average for BSA is 5 or 10 per abuser. I'm just not sure. ... It's why I say CSA statistics seem to still be in the dark ages.

Not sure ChildUSA is fair about this ... Example: Calling out old communal spaces like showers, but ignoring that schools required nude showers for all youth as part of gym class and that all YMCAs then ... and still do ... have communal shower spaces. In my twenty years of scouts, no adult has been in a communal shower with youth. In the last five years, showers have changed from communal to individual. Example: Inferring church basements are some dark potentially dangerous place, but ignoring such spaces exist everywhere. Ever been to a shopping mall. My youth was littered with stories of what happened with kids at the shopping malls or in the parking lots. Yes, scouting does have unique aspects that need to special consideration. But such special situations exist in many places. I can think of several reasons easily. BSA is long lived. Many of the worst cases were in organizations that grew and shrunk or failed. The worst offender I've heard about was a roller skating teacher. That business grew and shrunk. BSA is national and everywhere. This creates a huge pool of customers even if one percent of one percent of customers have claims, that's a huge pool. BSA tracked the incidents they knew. That's unique. It allowed momentum to start to trigger this case. Few organizations have something like that to create the momentum. It's an easy starting point for many future cases. KEY ONE ... Eagle1993 wrote: "The laws are the same for all organizations." really? Many organizations are still shielded. The biggest culprits that I saw as a kid were schools. "I believe" ... again not a lawyer ... that it would be much harder to sue a school district for hundreds of millions based on the actions of individual teachers. ... I'm pretty sure that we could easily find a school district with an average of a case per year. I'm sure we could find a state with dozens of cases per year. Yeah, who saw that coming. But then again, people had to have known for awhile for all the cases to exploded as they did. I suspect many organizations have such stories that individual hope time will bury. In 1991, I doubt safety committees historically listed CSA as a safety concern. They were looking at drowning, burning, poisoning, sharp edges, tripping hazards. CSA was a crime, not a safety issue. BSA has admitted their own fault. This whole legal cases is about compensating victims fairly. The trouble is BSA is not a deep bank of money that some claim. BSA has also been expanding YP rules and training for as long as I've been a member. There has been constant focus on it for 20+ years. That's far beyond what other youth organizations have done. There is cause to blame laws, society and lawyers. I'm not seeing victim blame. That's wrong. But, it is 100% clear science / society / laws did not handle this well until recently. The question is ... is this channel about the legal case? Or do you want to re-hash and debate the past. Many of us believe though BSA had bad incidents, BSA was trying to do something when the rest of society was ineffective and doing little.

We have no cause for direct attacks. I agree with you that we need to tread carefully as we are all very passionate. ON THE OTHER HAND ... Fair topics for this channel does include societal guilt and shared responsibility when others introduce their anger / assertions about BSA's past / current. When making those statements, you can't then switch back to say this channel is only about the bankruptcy. THERE IS A BALANCE. BSA has legal responsibilities by how the law works. BSA has moral responsibility too. It happened under their watch. The problem is when the debate cross from the legal case to social media blame / character assassination / group-think that BSA is bad. Many believe ... and it can easily be argued ... BSA is not unique. Many can argue BSA is far from unique. ... I won't re-introduce those arguments here, but they are extremely easy to make. ... Many can argue that BSA did more than others and was ahead of others addressing CSA. We should still not attack each other directly. There is no cause for that. The simple fact is this case raises passions. Emotionally, people find this whole situation inconceivable from many different directions and many perceptions. If you want to stick to the case, stick to the case. This legal situation is intriguing on it's own and I'm learning much on how things work by watching it Side note ... Statistics seem to be stuck in the dark ages. ... CSA is incredibly hard to find comparable / applicable statistics. ... For example, the one I question significantly now is about abusers have hundreds of victims. BSA case files show some with multiple. (not sure number or percent ... @ThenNow has a pretty clear example of multiple multiple). But, I've not seen files that reflect hundreds. I've seen few BSA IVF files with more than a few. Even recent cases. Yet, I've read of cases of roller skating teachers that have hundreds of victims (one guy bragged of 200+ ???) ... .Though our understanding of CSA has clearly evolved over the last 20/30 years, CSA statistics seems to continue to be stuck in the dark ages with little statistical understanding. Even this case yields little useful CSA statistics. If anything, it will yield many interesting statistics about searching for claims or the number of valid claims as a percent. Little useful related to CSA will come from this case. Perhaps that's the nature of statistical analysis of something people don't want to discuss.

Understood. I meant the other bigger bankruptcy. Even for the LC contributions, there are huge questions. Main one with LC contributions per US trustee, is it even legal to provide future protection to independent organizations that are not going thru bankruptcy. If it's found not providing future protection, I assume the LCs will hold back their contributions.

I'm still baffled by so many fundamental questions that I'm not sure how this continues.

Interesting that form still has references to charter organization and charter org representative. Is that a council signature or are they looking for a "Parents Of" organization.

I don't believe that's true at all. BSA has been stuck walking a fine course between a long list of societal changes. Though I could see a more secular future, I doubt anyone "wanted" that other than a few historical forum posters.

Makes sense. The relationships were always very loose. Why misrepresent it with something formal that is written? Most charter orgs were just being supportive of the community. They can still do that without signing an agreement (aka a contract).

What is Kosnoff's reasoning to expect a chapter 7? Lack of good faith negotiations? The waters are so muddied by all sides on this case and with laws changing even during this process that I'd find it hard to believe a successful "lack of good faith" could be found. (but then again, I'm no lawyer) ... ... Bad future financial picture? We've seen scouting successfully resurrected in England and other countries to great success. If BSA can get past the current bankruptcy and the bad press related (and covid), I'd believe a 110 year old non-profit could successfully continue to function.

Is "No coverage" before 1978 may not be a clear cut? 43 years ago. Insurance practices, policies and laws have changed. Loose agreements. BSA's communications with COs has always been pretty loose. Not really legal agreements and more like marketing agreements. Only now being interpreted as contracts. Self-insurance? I could see BSA having practiced self-insurance for CO liabilities. It was more a general statement about BSA being behind the CO and supporting the CO. "if it exceeds what you can cover, BSA will be there to help" ... Many companies still self-insure. Most importantly, no one in 1978 could conceive of the modern era settlements. In a 1978 context, BSA could have easily self-insured their COs and covered incidents. Bigger cash reserves. More members. More donations. Drastically smaller settlements.

People might not realize this. I cringe re-reading my old posts. I'm often doing current real work and revising these hobby posts. I cringe when I see typos. advise versus advice. argh.

"insurance plan for ALL churches" ... a leading one, but I did not think all. They don't represent "all". ... 134 of 485 diocese (arch and non-arch ... not sure on exact numbers ... just a quick search) ... I was thinking the archdiocese of Boston versus Denver might have different needs as they had very different member bases and incidents. The bigger decision factor might be the individual cash reserves of the individual diocese / archdiocese / parishes.

@ThenNow ... Is it a real "grouping" for Catholic / Methodist Ad Hoc Committees? The ad-hoc committees can have one law firm, but the units are chartered by the individual parishes and arch-diocese. I thought I saw the arch-diocese had their own lawyers and had often filed their own claims / case filings in this bankruptcy. So, ad-hoc committees might help with consistent advise to their members, but it's still just advice. Individual members might have different needs / different views.

Good point. Many organizations allow outside groups to use their facilities. This may be a situation where the CO is better off not signing anything. Even signing the facility use agreement then introduces questions of involvement / responsibility in potentially bad situations. As a former long term COR, I really have never seen any benefit to the CO to sign either of these documents. It was signed as good will and helping out the scouting unit. The CO never had a driving need for a signed agreement.

Limo services are nice shuttle busses. Sometimes econoliners with four rows of seats. Other times, similar to airport car rental shuttles. Never the traditional stretch cadilac. BUT ... it would be fun to show up in a stretch cadilac.

Even worse. "Equity" is a nebulous, obscuring, euphanism for questionable fairness. Nebulous ... If you directly ask, people will give you contradicting definitions. Further, people can't consistently apply it. Groups says schools need to teach the definition. .... hmmm ... maybe the issue is more than just lack of knowledge ... I learned equity as relating to ownership / expected value if liquidated. If you are paying a house morgage, how much equity do you have ten years in. If you are playing poker, what is your pot equity (average winnings). Equity relates to ownership. I've had years of diversity training and been given many definitions of equity. I still have trouble clearly defining it without a cue card in my hand. Also, defined as being "fair" ... An equitable agreement. A good example of this is eminent domain. Government takes your land. In exchange, you should receive fair value. Or, someone sues you and the court tries to find a "fair" judgement. ... But what is fair? Obscuring ... Social justice "equity" is the inverse of long held definitions. It's not ownership or historical "fairness". Rather, it's how much extra you need to be raised up to be able to participate. This is not ownership or fairness. How do you calculate fairness when one group takes and another receives? It may still be the right thing to do to create a better society, but it's not about "fair". Example: Giving all students a laptop for school work is equality. But if some students don't have internet at home or fast-enough internet at home, it's not equitable. So, the logical solution is a subsidizing program to fund getting those students internet at home. BUT this essentially means giving some students more by taking from others. ... I know this happens all the time right now (school, taxes, etc). It's that "equity" is about extending the threshold further. Justifying an even larger imbalance. Euphanism ... In the 1980s, the "peacekeeper" obscured the ugliness of the MX ICBM. Here, social "equity" is formalizing giving more to one group than to another. Equity being redefined to give basd on an unearned situation. Fairness ... At some point, it's best to just pull out and not participate as social "equity" is not fair. I bend over backwards to help scouts participate. If they can't afford it, we subsidize or explicitly cover. If they have special needs, we always adjust as much as we can. BUT, that's by choice. It's a volunteer basis. It's very different when it's legislated into law. Worse, it's a system that is gamed. In the example, it's families that drop internet coverage or do something else to have the school pay for the internet. Essentially taking advantage. Summary: "Equity" is being pushed to jusitify more social programs.

Answers in-line....

Stop? A one sided request. Many ugly bad statements are being made about BSA. Without comparative metrics. It's wrong to take incidents and draw larger conclusions. BSA had at it's peak 5m+ members registered each year. Even with just a 20% turn over, that's well over a 100m members. Is the abuse rate high? low? I'm not sure. Then set in a context of times when such things were not commonly reported or processed. The BSA metric seems high because of BSA having the IVF files helped document and raise awareness. The question is what is the real incident rate. No one knows. What is the real incident rate in other organizations and society. No one knows. As an engineer, you've created processes and methods. The IVF files were a systematic process; very much like a good engineering would create. In the era before everyone had a computer ... before easy background checks ... before education and medical experts were advocating for similar. BSA should be applauded for that process structure and doing more than others did. Incidents are always ugly. Always. People have a right to feel angry. The issue is as you said. Numbers. Standards. Comparisons. There are some numbers and I'm not sure BSA fairs any different than others. Better in some ways. Worse in others. Maligning BSA based on incidents is wrong. Label the incident and the individuals, but many of us are uncomfortable labeling the larger organization due to this.

So ... is there now a whole new class of claimants who are now also time barred because they missed their state's open window? Is there a new set of class actions to be done against law firms for explicit fraud and intentional incompetence? Seems we should have law firms suing law firms for cash or suing investment houses that funded those law firms.

Allude to his having 25 years of experience in this makes it absolutely fair to remind everyone that the noble experience has made him massively rich.

This is where I agree. Adults can kill the fun in scouting. The most important thing is to keep the fun in scouting. ... It really is a hard balancing line.

Yeah. There is a line. I'll miss things like upside-down bobcat ceremony, but I agree it's more a safety issue. BUT then again, I could see one in 10 or one in 30 scouts reacting badly. I'd fear more for the 45+ year old, out of shape dad than the kid.

Teasing wasn't being compare to hazing. MattR introduced teasing as a related question. Personally, I can see teasing as a form of hazing if done as part of someone being newly introduced into a group. If not, it can just be yet another form of bad behavior. Bad behavior is attractive because sometimes it can be fun to be naughty. But, it's still bad behavior. IMHO, a good rule of thumb ... are you comfortable asking the parent to do the same? ... at the next troop committee meeting ... Mrs Anderson, before the troop camp out, can you get the quartermaster to refill the trailer blinker fluid? ... then wait for their words for you at the next mtg.

@MattR ... Your words are thoughtful and well written. My two comments. #1 Teasing ... Even teasing is a gray issue. Grey for those on the other side of the pond. ... Teasing can be fun, but can easily and very quickly turn into bad behavior too. Personally for me, this is my weakness. I have been consciously trying to minimize my teasing of others. Instead, I'm trying to focus on authentic, open discussion. #2 "if not done right" ... It's not about correctly or not correctly using such a scenario (smoke shifter, bacon stretcher, snipe hunts, etc). It's in the eyes of the receiver to decide. Some will handle it well. Some will not. ... I will agree that some people can more easily get away with it with little or no harm. When I was younger, they'd be called a Teflon person as nothing sticks to them. ... But it really doesn't matter. The simple fact is we don't use bad behavior as a teaching mechanism. And, we don't haze either.

This is an old argument. My apologies for raising it again, but I see the discussion and it's hard to not remind everyone that others have different opinions. Coddling? No. That's pretending to have an excuse for boorish bad behavior. I'm saying it's setting a bad example. We should not be teaching that it's okay to treat others badly; aka being a jerk. ... This specific situation is called hazing and against the rules.