Wow, that is a very involved way to enter an organization. How many of these people are there? I’d presume not every molester meticulously plans to con people, but reading intentions would be extraordinarily difficult.
Situations like this could do with a two person rule, and actual verification of someone’s credentials… How did he ever get away with pretending to be a doctor? An obvious lack of education meant the boys had no clue what was going on.
They don’t seem to be doing a very good job of weeding out repeat offenders at their very organization, or verifying people who are present are who they should be either.
BSA and a lot of similar organisations in the US have seriously lacking safeguarding measures. Background checks are inadequate and it’s not properly verified that people are who they say they are, the lack of a two person rule is extremely alarming.
Scouts and almost all organisations here in the UK (except perhaps some religious organisations) do rigorous background checks, properly verify identities and qualifications, and importantly never allow a situation in which an adult is alone with a child (with a few extremely rare exceptions). I find it unbelievable a d dusgusting that these measures aren’t in place in youth organisations.
It’s worse than that. He goes into the middle of the woods on his own with a bunch of little boys. He invites a few into his tent to “spend the night” and no one ever questions it. His technique for “looking for ticks” and “applying bug spray” involves molesting them. He refuses to submit to background checks and it doesn’t affect him.
The only saving grace is that boys are more resilient against being molested than girls, but this may have helped this fall under the radar. Some of the victims also didn’t really want to put him behind bars, but to get him to stop molesting children. This may mean a 40 year sentence is too severe in their eyes, although they did not know of his track record.
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I don’t see any reason why victims of child molestation wouldn’t want a monster like him to be locked up for life. 40 years is overly lenient, nowhere severe enough for the crime.
Ultimately we need to figure out all the barriers that prevent victims from coming forward earlier and resolve them. Maybe also some rules like always have a second adult. No adults alone with children, especially not in the middle of the night.
I’m going by a reluctance to incarcerate him in the article. And a couple of unrelated victim case reports where they felt a bit guilty for putting someone away for a long time only for them to commit suicide. Prison is a very, very harsh place, especially for someone like this. But, who could have known he was this bad?
Some justice needs to be wrought, but ultimately, how did BSA end up in a position like this, where he could get away with so many crimes? Why were their safeguards so poor? Why weren’t they able to catch him sooner? BSA even withheld evidence from the courts, which could have been used to convict him.
Yes, a more hostile environment in previous years made this more difficult.