One thing to recognize is, if the facts in the story are correct, the molestation wasn’t a direct result of his involvment in the Scouts. The point is the Scouts have strict and clear rules for leaders and Scouts.
There is to be no one on one with a Scout. Even on drives the rule is two deep leadership. That prevents this stuff from going on. In the above story the moms gave this guy unsupervised access to their sons. That’s the fundamental problem. If someone won’t follow the rules and you think that person will make a good surrogate father you’ve already made your second mistake.
You are absolutely correct on the two-deep. I take it so literally that I have had to turn down friends requests to drive their kids, family friends to a scout meeting.
We normally transport two boys to Scouts in addition to my own. Last summer, my wife and kids were traveling. The two scouts could ride with me, but they live about a mile from each other. One is the son of a longtime family friend. His dad is deployed and as the oldest of several kids, his mom is pretty busy. I called my Unit Commissioner and asked him if he thought 5 minutes alone would be permissable. He said to use my best judgement.
Circumstances prevailed and I didn’t need to worry about it, but it’s always a concern.
Part of the call to the Unit guy was to be on record that I was going to have to break Youth Protection protocol for a short but necessary reason.