On February 18, 2020, the Boy Scouts of America filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy process offers BSA the opportunity to arrange a reorganization plan to meet its creditors, including Scouting abuse survivors. This restructuring may allow the BSA to come out of bankruptcy and continue operating.
The BSA in Bankruptcy Will Impact the Scouting Abuse Survivors.
The bankruptcy court will set a deadline for filing sexual abuse claims. The period will limit Scouting abuse survivors’ time to file claims for their abuse; this means that coming forward now is extremely important. The bankruptcy court has set the deadline for November 16, 2020. There are thousands of Scouting abuse survivors, so the settlement process can mean abuse survivors will receive the compensation they deserve faster.
To be sure, BSA is making for one of the biggest sexual abuse scandals in modern history. More than 12,000 children have reported sexual abuse going back to the 1940s. There are files kept, known as the “perversion files” hidden by the BSA, and leadership did nothing when they first got the reports 80 years ago! If they had acted and shown a measure of transparency, thousands of children would not have faced abuse. It is now known that local boy scout leaders suppressed the child abuse allegations to protect the BSA’s good name.
These leaders sacrificed the childhoods of the scouts for growth and money. With assets of well over 1 billion to 10 billion dollars, the CEO and the board of directors make excessively big salaries. To date, the BSA has paid over $150 million in settlements and legal fees.
Boy Scouts of America Principles
The BSA’s principles are to teach children to be helpful to others, physically strong, mentally aware, and morally straight. BSA leadership has fallen far behind those core values. The BSA leadership must protect the children in their organization. Yet, children have been molested, and the Boy Scouts did nothing. For decades they did not put policies in place to prevent the abuse, nor did they report anything to law enforcement. No one knows the number of victims over the BSA history, although the amount could be enormous.
It is known that there are victims many times over for the scout leaders that sexually abused children. There is a conservative estimate of 40,000 to 50,000 abuse survivors that are still alive. Today, the secret around those “perversion files” continues. Abuse often takes decades before coming forward, and years of shame, fear, and mental torture for the victim. According to CHILD USA, a Philadelphia based think tank, the average age that a victim discloses the abuse is 52. But violence in scouting has persisted ever since the decade’s long cover-up was exposed. TIME has interviewed a 17-year-old who said he was abused at the age of 10. A mother claims her son was abused in 2018.
Contact Ogle Law, LLC.
If you or a loved one has been the victim of sexual abuse, it is not too late to get help. At Ogle Law, we are 100% committed to our clients above all other considerations. We will do everything it takes to protect and advance the rights of our clients. Our attorney Bill Ogle, Esq. is a national board-certified civil trial specialist and will hold wrongdoers accountable for their actions. We serve all of Florida with local offices in Daytona Beach and Alachua, Florida.
Phone: Daytona Beach Office 386-260-2136. Alachua, 386-462-0476