Why the Boy Scouts went bankrupt

Boy Scouts of America files for bankruptcy

CNN February 18/20

12,000 Boy Scouts were abused over decades

The Boy Scouts of America has filed for bankruptcy, according to a court document filed in Delaware bankruptcy court early Tuesday.

The youth organization, which celebrated its 110th anniversary February 8, listed liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million and estimated assets of $1 billion to $10 billion.

The bankruptcy filing comes at a time when the organization faces hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits, thousands of alleged abuse victims and dwindling membership numbers. As a result of the filing, all civil litigation against the organization is suspended.

Paul Mones, a Los Angeles-based attorney representing "hundreds of sexual abuse victims in individual lawsuits," called the organization's bankruptcy filing a "tragedy."

"These young boys took an oath. They pledged to be obedient, pledged to support the Scouts and pledged to be honorable. Many of them are extremely angry that that's not what happened to them and the Boy Scouts of America did not step up in the way they should have," Mones said.

The Boy Scouts of America was fielding several hundred sexual abuse lawsuits

The Boy Scouts of America faced hundreds of lawsuits from alleged sexual abuse victims across the country -- all of which are now suspended because of the bankruptcy filing.

Several of the lawsuits allege repeated fondling, exposure to pornography, and forced anal or oral sex. In response, the Boy Scouts of America said at the time that they "care deeply about all victims of child abuse and sincerely apologize to anyone who was harmed during their time in Scouting." They added that they were "outraged that there have been times when individuals took advantage of our program to abuse innocent children."

"We believe victims, we support them, we pay for counseling by a provider of their choice and we encourage them to come forward. It is the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) policy that all incidents of suspected abuse are reported to law enforcement," the organization said.

Last April, exposed court testimony showed the organization believed more than 7,800 of its former leaders were involved in sexually abusing more than 12,000 children over the course of 72 years.

Mones, who was part of a legal team that won a $18.5 million verdict against Boy Scouts of America for former Scout and sexual abuse victim Kerry Lewis in 2010, said Monday that instead of potentially having their day in court, alleged victims who had pending lawsuits will now need to file claims in bankruptcy court.

Michael Pfau, a Seattle-based attorney whose firm represents 300 alleged victims across the country, said the bankruptcy claims process will be decidedly different for those suffering due to the Boy Scouts of America's alleged inaction.

"They won't have to give depositions involving their life history. Their lives won't be scrutinized, but they lose their right to a jury trial. For a lot of abuse survivors, telling their story in a court of law and forcing the organizations to defend their actions can be cathartic. That won't happen with a bankruptcy," Pfau said.

Mones said in the aftermath of the Lewis case, his law office received hundreds of phone calls from adult males claiming to have been Boy Scouts of America sexual abuse victims, but many states had statutes of limitation that narrowed their legal options at the time. It wasn't until years later, when some state legislators enacted new laws that enabled victims to file lawsuits without limits on when the alleged abuse took place, that a barrage of complaints against the youth organization were filed.

Pfau estimates the number of claimants will eclipse those of the Catholic church.

"The Catholic bankruptcies are limited in geographic scope. Here there will be claimants from all 50 states and the American territories," Pfau said. "We can talk about files and numbers, but in reality if you step back and realize the scope of the human carnage, it's stunning."

BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. I used to wonder about entrenched and socially-revered institutions like the Boy Scouts, its unshakeable foundation now completely demolished simply by the emergence of the truth. The dehumanizing phenomenon of systemic abuse is finally, painfully breaking through, often  explosively, and seemingly everywhere. Survivors were isolated, felt they were the only one, dared not speak because they were silenced, and died inside while others went about their way. This is what I call the "oh, surely not/he would never" view, the view of everyday normalcy while hell rages in silence on the other side.  I hate to think how prevalent all this is among people who have been too ashamed, frightened or dead by suicide to come forward. Perhaps the fact that men are now beginning to speak means they will be more readily believed, treated with more respect, and  won't be so barraged with "but why didn't you report it?" silencing tools, which is what women who have been raped almost universally face.

I remember back in the '90s - and everyone seems to have forgotten all about this, though it nearly destroyed my life - the "False Memory Syndrome Foundation", made up of parents and other authority figures who constantly downplayed the prevalence of child sexual abuse. They actually claimed, and the culture desperately wanted to believe it, that incest and sexual abuse was a fairly rare phenomenon, that there was a sort of "abuse bandwagon", and that therapists "implanted" these terrible notions that people claimed they had endured.   

The worst of it was the systematic and ruthless denial that it ever happened, and what we now call "gaslighting" - making the accuser seem "crazy" and delusional. They were usually successful because their victims' lives would be in ruins, and the perpetrators were mostly extremely comfortable, high-status people. They even mentioned it in one of their floods of magazine articles, saying, "We were proud to be such a fine-looking bunch of folks" who "would never" perpetrate such horrors. Survivors were accused of being zombified by abuse propaganda, becoming these harrowing spectres walking around like Stepford wives and bearing poisonous lies, even being coerced into "recanting" and taking it all back. Sometimes, the only way to get your family back was to sacrifice the truth. It was a choice between decapitation and tearing your heart out.

So as bad as I feel about all this, at least this horror is now out of the closet for good - or I hope so. But I believed that it had already happened in the early '90s, though it was all ruthlessly reburied and forgotten about. "False Memory Syndrome" (which doesn't exist, though I believe it forced its way through relentless lobbying into the DSM) was on the cover of EVERY magazine, including Time, Life and Newsweek, but if I bring it up now I get a baffled, "what are you talking about?" look. It's as if it didn't happen at all. Amazing what we do with trauma (i. e. completely forget it ever existed) when we don't want to face it. It doesn't even matter if we have experienced it first-hand or not. It's a cultural numbness which is blessed indeed for those wanting an "out". And amazing, too, how the profound isolation and being treated as crazy and delusional, which so often leads to demolished lives and suicide, seems to last forever.

I found a creepy video which I can't even post here, meant to be an illustration of one of the main tenets of scouting: OBEDIENCE. Now I see that concept as totally poisonous, not just coercive but monstrous. Taking little boys out into the woods and sexually violating them requires automatic submission to authority, a form of grooming and conditioning which paramiltary groups like scouting excel at. Good boys submit, and they don't tell tales, because Scoutmaster John WOULD NEVER do such a thing - and how can you even think of it? Why would such a possibility even come into your mind? What is wrong with you?  

Think how shockingly long it took for the truth to come out - and will it recede back into the shadows again, as it has done so many times before?

Light comes from everywhere: the stone church

I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.

So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.

As orderly as Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach. 

Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.

Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.

I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.

We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there. 

But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.

I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.

But then.

Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.

It was a church.

It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.

The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.

What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget  

This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.

But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.

I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.

But I put my HAND on that rock!

It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.

This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.

I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.

Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.

I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more. 

So that is that.

This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.

One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.

Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light. 

I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.

This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.

I had a letter from my dad, hand-written in all-caps: NO! IT DID NOT HAPPEN! He had the document countersigned by a psychiatrist who used to treat me when I was fifteen years old. This doctor was certain it didn't happen, as if he had been there. One thing you can say about my family: they sure know how to discredit a person.

The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.

But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "

Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.

So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?

Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?

But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.

As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.

Project description

The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)

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Sexual abuse: truth and consequences, part 1

This post is very long, but I find that editing it is difficult. It wades into a highly controversial issue that has probably taken a few years off my life:  should we always believe accusations of childhood sexual abuse, even when their source is potentially unreliable?


The article below (I've had to put it in a separate post because the line-spacing in THIS post got so hopelessly buggered-up) is based on an enthralling documentary on ABC TV's 20-20 about Aislinn Wendrow, a young autistic woman who supposedly made allegations of sexual abuse against her father. I say "supposedly" because the allegations came about in a very strange and convoluted way. Severely disabled and non-verbal, Aislinn's entire education up to college level had been accomplished by a method in which her hand was guided over a keyboard by a practitioner trained in "facilitated communication".


There is a fey mysterious quality to Aislinn, as if she dwells in a different kind of reality, one more subtle than that which can be punched out on a keyboard. Nevertheless, the family saw the new method as a blessing and a breakthrough, tapping into their daughter's hidden intellectual gifts and feelings. Then came the baffling accusations of abuse, a horrifying ordeal in which the girl's father was placed in solitary confinement for nearly three months without being convicted of anything.  Though he was eventually cleared of all wrongdoing, the family was left devastated and completely disillusioned with what must have seemed like an educational boondoggle.

Facilitated communication is a slippery slope. In theory, it should (or at least could) work: the practitioner guides the disabled person's hand, supposedly without coercion or force, assisting them in typing out their thoughts and allowing them to communicate, sometimes for the first time. In spite of the fact that it does not stand up to any sort of scientific testing, some parents of disabled children are still hanging on to the method with bulldog tenacity. Though one can hardly blame them for trying to maintain their hope, I can't help but be reminded of the "theory" that childhood vaccines cause autism.


This is one of those wild ideas that was thrown out there and took hold in the popular imagination. The doctor who originally published the idea has since been completely discredited and his paper withdrawn. But never mind: celebrity Moms, most notably ex-Playboy centrefold Jenny McCarthy, had already embraced the idea and written several "heartwarming" books about it. The public loves heartwarming and wants to believe, even in the face of the facts.

McCarthy believes some autistic kids (including her son) are
"indigo" or "crystal" children with unique psychic abilities. This appreciation seems to fly in the face of her fury over vaccinations: would she prefer her son be not-so-special? If he had been just an ordinary kid, at least three bestsellers never would have been written (or, using another psychic metaphor, "ghostwritten").


But back to the topic at hand. For reasons I don't need to explain, the issue of childhood sexual abuse is like a quagmire in a minefield. I know that the truth can get buried, and victims can be flipped around into perpetrators, people who "destroyed the family" by even thinking that their parents might have abused them. The so-called False Memory Syndrome movement in the early '90s (which, mysteriously, you don't hear about any more) made my teeth ache. I couldn't help but see perpetrators hiding out in this organization, which after all was nothing but a lobby group with no valid research to back up their claims.

But if you try hard enough, and search long enough, you'll find something that passes for proof. People are incredibly stubborn about their beliefs, and many of them can't or won't admit they are wrong.


Once the pendulum swings one way, it can swing forcefully the other way, knocking whole families over for life. False Memory Syndrome reminded me of high school physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the early '90s there was an unprecedented outpouring of sexual abuse stories in the media, particularly on talk shows where hosts like Ricki Lake and Sally Jesse Raphael sat transfixed by extreme stories of multiple personality caused by Satanic ritual abuse.

Then, bingo-boingo, here comes "FMS" to knock the pendulum
violently the other way. Some women (including some I knew personally) were so relieved to put down their emotional burden that they recanted accusations which I am convinced were valid.

But how many were valid? How many imagined or coerced? How
many "implanted" by unscrupulous therapists? Dear God, have we
learned nothing at all? For here it comes again, the idea that someone can concoct traumatic memories and make them seem real. The most disturbing element, in my mind, is that these "facilitators" don't necessarily set out to do harm. Their unconscious motivation to help their client leads them to put words in their mouths and ideas in their heads, up to and including sexual abuse which never took place.


How could this possibly work? It could. It's kind of like a ouija board. That pointer isn't going anywhere without the touch of human hands.

I am sure I don't have the last word on this contentious issue, but it has affected my family and will continue to affect me for the rest of my life.  Aislinn's story is completely enthralling, and provides one more piece in an increasingly baffling, disturbing puzzle.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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