Boy Scout Abuse
A lot of reports have come out recently from men who are alleging that they experienced sexual abused at the hands of adult leaders while while participating in activities organized by the Boy Scouts of America as boys/young men. I find these accusations to be very troubling, and I’m having a hard time believing them. At this point, more than 80,000 accusations have been made.
I recognize that my experience is not necessarily representative of everyone else’s experiences, but for what it’s worth, I was involved in Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts from the age of 6 until I was 18 when I earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and during my twelve years in scouting, I never once experienced or heard about any inappropriate behavior from the adult leaders in my pack/troop. I also reached out to several men I know who were involved in Boy Scouting (from my troop as well as other troops), and none of them ever encountered anything like what’s being alleged here, either. Boy Scouts make exhaustive use of the buddy system, practically never going anywhere or doing anything alone, so the notion of widespread sexual abuse being covered up just doesn’t seem terribly practical to me. Again, I’m not suggesting that my experience and the accounts of the handful of men I asked are an exhaustive representation of everyone else’s experiences.
To be clear, while I nor anyone I know has ever experienced sexual abuse from an adult leader involved in scouting, scouts fooling around with each other is something that we know happens. After all, boys who join Boy Scouts are individuals who are likely adventurous by nature, and on top of that, we’re talking about a bunch of horny, hormonal preteen and teenage boys in dark tents by themselves with no females to be found for miles. It’s not hard to imagine that they might get curious and explore with one another. Frankly, I don’t see a problem with this; my view is that it’s completely natural for boys to experiment with each other throughout their youth.
That said, I wonder if some of these accusations could be coming from men who willingly participated in sexual encounters with other scouts around their same age. Allow me to elaborate.
We live in a society that increasingly encourages people to see themselves as victims and wants to denormalize consensual same sex conduct between men. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to me that some of the boys who had those experiences, as they matured and began to understand themselves as “straight” and as they developed narrow and homophobic views of masculinity, would have began to feel a bit of internal conflict at the thought of these positive memories of same sex contact.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that when presented with legal advertisements offering financial rewards for alleging BSA-related abuse, some of those men would take the psychological out, using this as a way to undermine what they see as the masculinity- and straightness-damning implications of those positive memories by retroactively labeling the events contained within them as abuse. Simply put, if you can convince yourself that you were abused, then you don’t have to feel “gay” about having enjoyed consensually fooling around with other boys.
To be clear, I’m not saying that any guy who experimented with other boys in his youth should be locked into an identity defined by that attraction. Sexuality is fluid and can shift over time, and it’s not unlikely that many of these encounters between scouts may have occurred more out of convenience than raw attraction. Regardless of the motivating factor, boys participating in sexual exploration with one another isn’t destructive, but it is destructive for society to tell them after the fact that having done so defines them, that they were wrong for initiating it, or that they’re victims for participating in it.
If 80,000 boys truly were sexually assaulted, that’s outrageous and tragic, and the perpetrators should be held legally responsible. But that doesn’t mean that the institution of scouting isn’t still a net benefit to its members and to society, and it doesn’t mean that we should dismantle the entire organization for these alleged assaults which would have only affected about 0.1% of men who have ever been involved with the Boy Scouts of America. After all, we didn’t cancel Catholicism when they were outed for harboring a bunch of pedophile priests (and they’re surely inflicting more societal trauma than the Boy Scouts ever could).
In an age where toxic masculinity is increasingly being called out, we should be encouraging boys and young men to express and explore their masculinity in productive ways. Unfortunately, this train seems like it’s got the momentum to smash right through one of the only institutions with more than a century-long reputation for being a positive outlet for American boys to express themselves and to grow and learn the skills they need to become men. We shoot ourselves in the foot when we allow a few predators who don’t know how to control themselves to spur us to tear down an institution that teaches boys how to do just that.