T2Eagle

11 minutes ago, yknot said:

I think that's exactly the problem with YP that Michael Johnson and the TCC are pointing out. Too much of it is local and open to interpretation and loopholes. I am guessing Johnson and the TCC would like to see your Council's policy nationalized. 
 

What i would like to see is some evidence that either not having this policy today is the reason for abuse today, or evidence with some analysis that when implemented and taking into account things like what Qasze mentioned that it would make scouting safer overall.

I posted earlier how this works in practice, and remain skeptical that a background check for every parent who accompanies a unit would actually turn up any significant number of already arrested and convicted abusers while at the same time having both a large monetary cost and a chilling effect o the supervision of units by non registered parents.

3 hours ago, 5thGenTexan said:

Got email from Council today regarding the Methodist Church and recharter....

 

 

Am I reading this right: you don't formally recharter, but you do renew the membership for scouts and adults?  Paying the renewal fee but not the council specific fee?

1 hour ago, johnsch322 said:

We do not, especially when his story is almost verbatim what the coalition is trying to sell.

We need to be very very careful about questioning the veracity of someone putting themselves forward as a survivor.  We wouldn't tolerate anyone questioning the credibility of the posters who have come forward on these forums as survivors.  We shouldn't --- and won't --- accept it about others.  

There are tens of thousands of survivors, that certainly means there are just as many divergent and honestly held opinions on what the best course of action should be.

The distinction between guardian and legal guardian drawn by the G2SS seems to be about whether the child is being given over to another adult (legal guardian) or whether they're attending with an adult (guardian).  Especially if mom is attending I don't think you have any issue.  

For those not currently in the program, here is some sense of how the 72 hour rule works. 

Our Pack and Troop have a joint weekend each year.  About 40+ Cubs.  This is a cabin campout, all YPT rules are followed: kids in one room adults in the other.  We have one cabin for scouts with dads and a smaller cabin, scouts with moms.  Most folks arrive Friday night and leave after campfire on Saturday. 

On the ScoutsBSA side, on weekend campouts we will sometimes have an unregistered parent camp with us.  This is always in addition to at least two and usually three or or four registered leaders.  Anyone who camps with us this way needs to complete both the BSA YPT and the Catholic Virtus YPT so they’re aware of our expectations and the rules.  We encourage parents to join us this way primarily so they can see how the program works and how we handle their scouts, and secondarily as a way to recruit new leaders – you see what we do, think it looks interesting, and take the next step to become a leader.

So it’s not the case that “virtually anyone” can camp with the scouts.  We’re talking about parents or guardians. 

If we have to go to background checks for everyone, backgrounding pretty much one parent for every Cub ever, I suppose we can make it work.  But I’m not sure how much safer that makes things.  My understanding is that these crimes are planned, not crimes of opportunity, and on top of that very few people actually are convicted of CSA and are then back on the street with their own kids.

I inherited an Air Scouts handbook circa 1943, it is really cool.

11 hours ago, johnsch322 said:

The rape of a child by an adult in the 40's 50's 60's and 70's was a crime, considered as deviant behavior and was not blamed on the child.

The first part of your statement is correct, the latter is sadly not.  Think of excuses like "what was she (he) wearing"  "how were they behaving"  "why didn't they say no, fight harder, scream more" etc.  "Why did they lore an otherwise good man to do this"  Imagine if the victim happened to be gay. 

The amount and ubiquitousness of victim blaming in the not even distant past was incredible, and sadly still can exist today.

3 minutes ago, SiouxRanger said:

So, what is Mr. Johnson's motivation to come forward and make any statement at all?

He genuinely cares, he thinks he was right and BSA should have agreed with him; he either reached out to the folks presenting him or they reached out to him, and they found kindred beliefs and a desire to act on them.  There's no reason to think there are any ill motives here.  And at the same time the lack of ill or ulterior motives doesn't make his views or his interpretation of his experience the only accurate or legitimate ones.

20 minutes ago, Eagle1993 said:

The two areas I was surprised was that 50% of the abuse are done by youth and known abusers are in the BSA. 

The other is known abusers are in the BSA.  That one needs specifics.  I'm struggling to accept that one.  I hope it isn't true.

When I hear stats that not only don't comport with my own experience but that also seem really high even if I credit that my experience may be sheltered I start to wonder about definitions.  Earlier there was a discussion about folks' personal knowledge of YPT violation cases.

The only two I've known of personally were not in my unit but came from my involvement in summer camp and Jambo.  One was a case of a group text chat the was explicit and then also involved "sexting" pictures.  The other was a slapping of genitals that a group of scouts was doing.  Both these incidents were bad behavior, both involved youth in the same age cohort, both would probably fall into a broad definition of abuse (the latter was probably better classified as bullying) but I don't think they really qualified as the type of abuse that we've been discussing, and I don't think we should conflate the two.  An overly broad definition seems to me to diminish the seriousness and horror of what victims making claims today suffered.

1 hour ago, PeterHopkins said:

I agree that is not the intention. I also believe that ScoutReach make makes the program, at least a taste of it, available in places where it may not exist. However, the outcome it produces is segregation.

Yu just said yourself that you were a commissioner for such a district. Why are ScoutReach units grouped together and treated as a district? What would be so terrible about them attending a camporee with traditional units?

In addition to the noble goals of ScoutReach, I think there is a motivation to operate it in a way that maximize membership numbers. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the youth should be getting the full benefit of the program.

The largest city in my council, by far, has a roughly 65% black population. No one would ever guess that, if they looked around the room at one of our OA lodge events.

Scoutreach units are treated as a district because they operate differently then, and need different services and resources than a traditional units.  They use paid leaders to provide the program, and at least in my council are always a part of council events, and are certainly welcome at other district's events.  

3 hours ago, CynicalScouter said:

Right, I will tell you that it is the adults and I've gotten several versions of "I've been in scouting XX years and never heard about it."

To which my response is "Well did you think BSA or the victims are going to advertise 'I was abused' or 'John Scout was abused'?"

To be clear, what I said and what I say is that to my knowledge it has not happened in our unit.  Even today none of the cases in my council involve my CO.  I don't say I've never heard about it.  If you're conversing with someone about it it's obvious they've heard about it.  

I'm curious, how many, as a percentage of units, do you think this has occurred in?  Even if the victims and BSA was advertising about it, which parenthetically they actually have been doing, how many scouts and scouters do you think would be able to say that they were within one degree of separation from an abuse or abuser.  For as terrible as things have been, and in no way downplaying either the seriousness or terrible negligence involved in how big a problem this is, as a factual matter the overwhelming number of scouts who have passed through the program weren't abused, weren't near abused, weren't parts of units where abuse occurred.

Abuse has been and is a terrible problem, it is a widespread problem, but it is by no means what could be considered a "common" problem under an objective understanding of that word.

19 minutes ago, johnsch322 said:

Question to current scout leaders. What do you tell current scouts and or their if asked about the current bankruptcy and the child sexual abuse in the past?

First, virtually no one asks about the former.  But if they did what I would say is that it's a mess, it doesn't really have anything to do with us, and my belief is that in the end, after long and arduous negotiations, some deal will be worked out that compensates the victims and allows BSA, our council, and our troop and pack, to continue.  Ultimately, like all large bankruptcies and huge complex lawsuits, there will be a settlement.  No one will really like it, but there's actually no way for one side or the other to "win" it as a matter of law.

As to the latter.  Past abuse doesn't really come up often.  When it does I tell them that to my knowledge we've never had any incidents in our units' past. 

Talking about preventing abuse, that does come up, and even when it doesn't I always talk to new parents about YPT and how we implement it.  What I tell them is there are rules and training, all leaders have to take the training and I encourage parents to at least look through the highlights of GTSS.  I tell them the main rule is that no adult is ever alone with a scout, and that we take the rules seriously and adhere to them --- period.  But the most important thing that we all can do is be vigilant, and transparent, and communicate.  If you have a question --- ask.  If there's something that you wonder about --- ask.  If you think you see something untoward say something, and if you really think there's a problem there are all sorts of ways to report it beyond us.

If you have kids today none of this is new or unusual or something that you're not encountering with every activity that your kids are in. 

I'm not someone who buys into the notion that somehow people didn't know how wrong this was in the past and somehow that provides some mitigation of any organization's responsibility back then.  What I do know is what is different today is an awareness of just how common this can be, especially if treated the way it was in the past, and how devastating it is for kids if it happens.  I believe that awareness is THE thing that makes kids safer today.

23 hours ago, skeptic said:

I was led to believe that the early childhood inocculations were forever.  I got what was available in the mid to late forties, then the polio when it became available.  I had mumps and chicken pocks as a kid in very heavy cases, then oddly got measels twice my last quarter of my freshman year; first the regular "3 day", then just a couple weeks later the German.  Missed half the last quarter and messed up my grades royally due to absences.  Also was given stuff for plague when I was supposed to go to Peru in the Peace Corps, then got "selected out" and ended up joining the Air Force in 65 and when they had an outbreak of plague in Turkey in 1966 they gave all of us in Europe the plague shots, and I got really ill due to the basically double dose.  They would not believe me that I had gotten it less than a year before, and I did not have the proof.  But, never got the plague.  

 

Not all inoculations "convert" that is they don't always trigger enough of a response to confer immunity, and immunizations can wain over time.

I was inoculated for pertussis as a kid, but ended up with it in my forties, almost undoubtedly because one of the kids in my son's preschool was not vaccinated.

My wife recently had to prove all her immunizations for a new job in health care.  There was no practical way to get her childhood vaccination records so she got blood work done to show her titres.  Turns out she did not have immunity to mumps and had to get a new MMR shot.

41 minutes ago, CynicalScouter said:

 

Likely because BSA did absolutely no reference checks and focused on convictions. According to this, the plea deal made no mention of anything about child sexual abuse. He plead out to firing off some pepper spray and if he stayed on his best behavior even THAT was dropped.

 

That's a very unfair assumption.  The record was expunged, which means for all intents and purposes it never existed. 

In order to find out about the incident(s) you would need to conduct an independent investigation of him going back nearly a decade --- not interviewing references but rather pursuing people who may have known him and were themselves no longer associated with his previous employers.  I worked briefly for a United States Attorney and they weren't even that thorough in backgrounding me. 

This guy worked for one police department, was fired, worked for another department and the returned to the original department where he was rehired and conducted the behavior he was eventually, ineffectually, charged with.

Short of a deep investigation involving law enforcement officers with compulsive powers there's almost no way this guy would have been discovered by background.

What's not answered is how the abuse happened despite YPT.

42 minutes ago, Eagle1993 said:

So the COR will be brought into court and asked what he/she did to review/approve the leader (call references, etc.). In many cases, I expect COs could be found negligent in their role in youth protection under the current BSA system.

I'm honestly a bit surprised any CO would sign up for this level of liability.  Note that going forward, national BSA has almost no net assets (so probably not that attractive for lawsuits).  Many LCs are drained.  COs may be the ones targeted and many are paper only meaning they could be found negligent.

So, I'm the COR for a Catholic Parish.  For our parish, scouts is only one of many ministries for youth.  We have our own version of YPT, and it is required of everyone who volunteers: coaches, choir directors, catechism teachers, parents on field trips, etc., so the idea of having volunteer run youth programs is neither new nor unusual, and of course all Catholic parishes are well aware of liability for abuse.  So it's not unreasonable some version of the CO model will exist going forward.  The challenge of liability is insuring yourself against it.  That is probably the biggest issue going forward between COs and BSA.  

What I would like to understand, and where the failure of BSA transparency is so acute, is how abuse occurs today in light of YPT rules.  I doubt it's in background check failures, there are actually few convicted abusers who are slipping through those cracks.  Can anyone give an example that they know of how the abuse occurred despite the YPT rules?

In my units it would take a very determined predator, actively fooling all the other adults, and certainly conducting the abuse not at a scouting event, for all the protections to fail.  I know it happens, I just wish I knew more about how -- especially in whatever common, predictable ways --- so that as scouters we could even better protect against it.

Welcome to the forum McHugh.

Looking back through this thread it seems the consensus ended up being that insects would be included.  Frankly, insects are harder to truly identify much of the time.  "I saw a mosquito" is no more sufficient than "I saw a sparrow".  

4 hours ago, yknot said:

 

That's from 2012. The standards were updated in 2018: 

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/historic-safety-standard-to-eliminate-majority-of-corded-window-coverings-from-us-market-takes-effect-300765221.html

 

Still not illegal, and since they're widespread in homes from before 2018 a good skill to have and perform correctly.  I have roughly 20 of these in my house, and no toddlers, infants, or small children.  I'm pretty sure that I would repair rather than replace, and the supplies to do so are readily available from any number of sources.

From your link:

"The standard's new requirements segments the market into custom and stock, and requires all stock products, sold in stores and online, to be cordless or have inaccessible or short cords," said WCMA Executive Director Ralph Vasami.  "Stock products account for more than 80 percent of all window covering products sold in the U.S. and CPSC incident data shows that requiring these products to be cordless or have inaccessible cords would have the most significant and immediate impact on reducing the strangulation risk to young children from certain window covering cords."

Corded window coverings will only be available on custom-order products, as corded products are still needed by a wide range of consumers, including the elderly and those with disabilities, those short in stature, and those with windows in hard-to-reach locations. The revised standard imposes new restrictions on these custom-order products such as requiring operating cords to have a default length of 40% of the blind height [currently it is unlimited] and a default to a tilt wand instead of a tilt cord. "

On 9/14/2021 at 3:45 PM, yknot said:

This is one of those many badges that need updating because it contains extremely dated information. 

For example, scouts should not be taught to replace cords on blinds because they are illegal. Corded blinds are no longer manufactured and may no longer be offered for sale. 

Corded blinds aren't illegal, and in fact the correct installation and replacement of older cords is critical in making corded blinds safe or safer.

ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2012, National Standard for Safety of Corded Window Covering Products, was approved on November 30, 2012. The revisions include: requirements for durability and performance testing of tension/hold down devices, including new requirements for anchoring; specific installation instructions and warnings; new requirements for products that rely on “wide lift bands” to raise and lower window coverings; new requirements for a warning label and pictograms on the outside of stock packaging and merchandising materials for corded products; and new testing requirements for cord accessibility, hazardous loop testing, roll-up style shade performance, and durability testing of all safety devices. CPSC staff believes that these changes should increase durability of certain components, encourage creativity in design, help improve consumer awareness of the strangulation risk associated with cords, and improve awareness of the safer products that should be used in homes with young children.

8 hours ago, SiouxRanger said:

1.  On a compulsion theory:  States that have not reopened their statutes of limitation, just might do so in the future-perhaps in response to the proceedings in National's bankruptcy.  Claimants in those states would suddenly have valid, non-time-barred claims.  I don't think that the insurers would be liable for those claims. I just don't see how a bankruptcy court can rewrite contractual obligations. That statutes of limitation were opened in any state amazes me.

 

Neither the court nor the legislature is rewriting any contractual obligations.  Oversimplifying a bit, the contract between the insurer and the insured is to provide indemnification to the insured for the costs of the torts (acts of harm) that they commit during the period of the policy. 

SOLs don't actually cover or not cover that contract between the insured and insurers.  The SOLs cover two DIFFERENT parties, the insured and the victim of their tort.

The insured and insurers could write a policy that limits coverage based on when a claim is made or on possible changes in the law.  SOLs change in both directions, if not frequently at least in some manner forseeably, usually every few decades.  If a legislature shortens the SOL, a fairly common occurrence when doing "tort reform", nobody expects that insurance companies will recalculate past premiums and offer reimbursements based on their now lower risk of having to pay claims.   That insurance companies might misprice their risk is , well, their risk.  It is part of the reason that they themselves purchase reinsurance.  

Welcome to the forums.

You clearly have never lived in an old house.😀  The 100+ year old houses I've lived in have each and every one of them needed all of these repairs.

17 hours ago, Muttsy said:

Wow! You guys are true blue. You buy insurance coverage for yourselves just to volunteer to serve?  Are your wives on board with it? If I was your best friend I’d take you out for a beer and a heart to heart. 

I took out an umbrella policy because of all the kid related things I was doing: scouting, coaching, driving kids on field trips, etc. 

I recommend to anyone involved in kid programs to get the coverage. It's relatively cheap, whereas when kids get hurt it's very expensive..

2 hours ago, SiouxRanger said:

Possibly parishes and dioceses announcing different rules at different times.  Surely, the guidance or directives will be coordinated at some level, not only to prevent initial confusion, but to avoid having to retract guidance or directives at some point.

Ha, ha, ha.  herding Bishops makes herding cats look easy.  the 144 dioceses and 32 Archdioceses you mentioned are 176 independent organizations run by 172 VERY independent Bishops.  A diocese can decide everything for its parishes, but no one short of Pope Francis can decide something for all the Dioceses, and even that gets very complicated.

Have you ever done this before successfully? 

When we upload from Troopmaster, we upload to Council's Internet Advancement 2.0.  A day or two later everything shows up in Scoutbook.  I didn't think you could go directly from Troopmaster to Scoutbook.

If you've done this before, and it just doesn't seem to  be working this time, I would try taking that scout out completely and see if it will upload.

If it just seems like Scoutbook is hanging up because of size, I would try a few scouts at a time.

Good luck!