Boy Scouts hosts closed-door forum on sex abuse

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Even as its past policies on sex-abuse prevention fuel controversy, the Boy Scouts of America is hosting an unprecedented closed-door symposium Thursday with other national youth organizations, hoping to share strategies to combat future abuse.

The 10 participating groups, including the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the YMCA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters, will hear presentations from some of the nation's top experts on child-sex-abuse prevention. They also will discuss the sensitive topic of how uncorroborated information about potentially threatening adult volunteers might be shared among youth organizations.

Planning for the one-day session in Atlanta began late last year, part of long-standing efforts by the Boy Scouts to demonstrate a commitment to preventing the abuse problems that have bedeviled it and other youth groups over the decades.

Boy Scouts officials have been criticized for a lack of transparency in the ways they deal with sex abuse allegations. They have fought to keep confidential their "perversion files," which reveal many cases where the Scouts failed to protect youths from pedophiles.

Two weeks ago, the Scouts released files from 1959-85 on 1,200 alleged pedophiles after news media won a court case against the organization.

The public is excluded from the Thursday symposium, which the organization says will encourage candid discussion among participants.

Michael Johnson, a former police detective hired by the Scouts in 2010 as national director of youth protection, has been the key organizer of the symposium, calling it a "groundbreaking opportunity" for groups serving more than 17 million youngsters to discuss their shared challenges and antiabuse strategies.

"Crazy as it sounds," Johnson said, "this hasn't been done before."

One of the symposium's sessions will deal with the type of confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts since the 1920s, containing a range of verified and unverified allegations involving thousands of adults deemed to pose a threat of abuse.

The Scouts' policy - not always adhered to over the decades - is to share substantive allegations with law enforcement. Thursday's symposium will include discussion of whether, and how, these types of files might also be shared among youth groups, even when the allegations are unproven.

Participant Suzanna Tiapula, director of the National District Attorneys Association's National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, praised the steps taken by the Boy Scouts in recent years to improve their child-protection policies.

Some of those steps date back to the 1980s, while others followed the 2010 judgment by an Oregon jury ordering the Boy Scouts to pay $19.9 million in damages to Kerry Lewis, who had been abused in the 1980s by an assistant Scoutmaster in Portland.

That case led to the recent release of the Scouts' files.

Tiapula expressed regret that Thursday's symposium would be closed to the news media.

"It creates a sense there are things in the community that they can't be sharing," she said. "An open meeting conveys to the world they're doing the right thing."