Free Republic

Decades of confidential sexual abuse allegations from within the Boy Scouts of America will spill into public view later today when more than 1,200 of the organization’s “perversion files” are released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court. The files will offer the public an unprecedented look at how suspected molestations were handled by one of the nation’s leading youth organizations from the early 1960s through 1985, a time when awareness of sexual abuse was evolving rapidly. ~snip~ The abuse reports to be released today played a key role as evidence in a landmark Oregon lawsuit in 2010 that resulted...

The thousands of men expelled from the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America on suspicion of molesting children came from all walks of life — teachers and plumbers, doctors and bus drivers, politicians and police officers. They ranged in age from teenagers to senior citizens and came from troops in every state. As the Scouts have long said, the files suggest no single profile of a predator. But a close look at nearly 1,900 confidential files opened between 1970 and 1991 revealed a pattern: Many suspected molesters engaged in what psychologists today call “grooming behavior,” a gradual seduction in which predators...