Why Was the BSA Sued for Molestation of Children?

Why not just the individual perps?

Why was the BSA sued? How was it responsible? What did the BSA do as an organization that made it liable?

The Nature of the Organization

  • Centralized Authority: Its 1916 congressional charter granted the BSA a monopoly over Scouting in the United States. This eliminated competition and placed the organization in absolute control of the movement.
  • Delegated Responsibility: Volunteers were instructed to escalate serious violations to professional staff. Once escalated, the corporation itself assumed responsibility for handling abuse allegations.
  • Systemic Failures: Instead of reporting to law enforcement, professionals often managed cases internally, maintaining secret files and quietly removing abusers without transparency or accountability.

Why the Corporation Was Liable

  • Duty of Care: By requiring volunteers to defer to professionals, the BSA assumed a heightened duty to protect youth. The organization became the gatekeeper of safety.
  • Breach of Duty: The failure to report abuse, the concealment of risks, and the lack of adequate safeguards constituted a breach of that duty.
  • Institutional Negligence: The harm was not a series of isolated incidents. It was enabled by systemic negligence within the corporate structure.
  • Took Over Control: By assuming overarching control over the entire Scouting movement, which they were not morally entitled to assume, they pulled the responsibility for youth safety away from the unit. The unit is naturally the primary locus of obligation in the eyes of the families who entrusted their children to the B.S.A.

Volunteers vs. Professionals

  • Volunteers: Represent the movement, serving youth directly, often with limited authority to act beyond escalation.
  • Professionals: Employees with training, authority, and access to records. Their actions — concealment, lack of reporting, inadequate safeguards — are what made the BSA itself liable.

The Professional Culture of Non-Transparency

  • Training Focus: For much of the BSA’s history, professional training emphasized membership growth, fundraising, and organizational loyalty, not child protection. Safeguarding only became a formal training priority decades later.
  • Confidentiality Norms: Professionals were taught to protect the reputation of Scouting above all else. Allegations were treated as sensitive matters to be handled quietly, reinforcing secrecy.
  • Employment Pressure: Professional Scouters are career employees. Objecting to non-transparent practices could jeopardize advancement or employment. Unlike volunteers, who are agents of sponsoring organizations, professionals are directly accountable to the BSA hierarchy.
  • Result: Even when individuals felt moral discomfort, the institutional expectation was to “go with the flow” and trust the processes they had learned. This culture of silence ensured that systemic failures persisted.

Baden-Powell’s Warning

In his final letter to Scouts, Baden-Powell encouraged youth to live with joy and service. Less known is his final letter to Scouters, in which he warned that Scouting must remain a volunteer‑run organization. He understood that the vitality of the movement depended on volunteers leading, not professionals controlling.

The lawsuits prove his warning prophetic: once the corporation and its professional staff claimed authority, the movement’s spirit was compromised, and responsibility shifted away from the grassroots. The failures that followed were organizational, not volunteer‑driven.

The Larger Pattern

The lawsuits reflect a broader truth: when an organization claims control over a movement, it must serve that movement faithfully. The BSA’s monopoly and centralized authority weakened the Methods of Scouting and diluted the outdoor and youth-led character of the program. Yet failed to protect the very children entrusted to its care.

Placing Responsibility Where It Belongs

The shame does not rest with the volunteers who carried forward the spirit of Scouting. It rests with the corporation that:

  • Claimed authority over the movement
  • Assumed responsibility for safeguarding
  • Trained professionals in a culture of secrecy
  • Ignored Baden-Powell’s warning to keep Scouting volunteer‑run
  • Failed to act with transparency and accountability

The lawsuits are not an indictment of Scouting as a movement. They are an indictment of the organizational failures of the BSA as a corporation. True Scouting remains a volunteer and youth-led movement. The organization exists to serve it, not to control it.