More than 250 convicted of child sexual abuse while they were UK Scout leaders | Hacker News Reader

More than 250 convicted of child sexual abuse while they were UK Scout leaders

theguardian.com

"The Scout movement has also faced allegations of child sexual abuse in other countries.

Earlier this, month, the Boy Scouts of America said it had reached an $850m agreement with attorneys representing about 60,000 victims of child sexual abuse."

Assuming 5 victims per criminal, that would suggest that at least 12,000 US scout leaders should have been convicted.

When the lawsuit story was posted on Fox News, it got thousands of comments. I scrolled them, looking for one person who admitted that this was taking place and had been for a long time. Not one. The thread was full of posters proclaiming that scouts were great and nothin' bad never happened to no kids while they was there. Your stats and the lawsuit itself would seem to decry that claim. The denial surrounding that organization is reaching the levels found in the you-know-which church.

I wonder what the breakdown of perpetrators is from adults vs peers. I believe the suit/lawyers in the U.S. were also looking for people who were abused by other children (probably mostly kids inappropriately "experimenting" with each other).

Perhaps there were thousands of adult perpetrators, but I find 12,000 to be an unimagineable number in this case.

I also wonder what the standard of proof was for claims.

I was in Boy Scouts in the early to mid-80s. I didn’t see anything like these types of activities.

But just because I didn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

I am surprised here at the scale of the problem, but not that this kind of thing happened as a whole.

Most cases of child abuse and neglect take place out of the eyesight of others or they would be stopped. The problem is not that you didn't see it. The problem in all of these organizations from churches to Michael Jackson to Penn State is that there were people who knew it was going on and they didn't stop it. In every case I've ever heard of from the endemic abuse in British schools to the church's continual reshuffling of known abusers (without kicking out a single one) depended on people who did know and didn't say anything, and those people were always people in power in the organization.

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