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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 i

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

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

@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 ha

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

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

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 sp

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

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 nationw

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 org

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