The Boy Scouts statue at the entrance to the organization's headquarters in Irving, Texas in 2013.Tim Sharp / Reuters
Some 92,700 people have reported being victims of sexual abuse in the American organization Boy Scouts of America (BSA, in English), the lawyers of the victims who are handling the case reported Monday.
The lawyers announced this Sunday that the complainants were about 82,000, but the number increased to 92,700 at the end of the period to file the lawsuit this Monday in a bankruptcy court in the state of Delaware (United States), where the Boy Scouts declared bankrupt this year in an attempt to survive the wave of lawsuits.
The number of victims is much higher than that documented in 2019 by a lawyer hired by the Boy Scouts to identify the cases that occurred in the organization.
Janet Warren collaborated with the organization beginning in 2013 to analyze a private registry of people accused of abuse or misconduct, used to prevent the re-entry of such individuals.
According to Warren's testimony, she was hired by the Boy Scouts to review all the registration documents, from 1944 to 2016, which took five years.
More than 1,200 leaders and other adults in the organization were then identified as alleged perpetrators of abuse.
"We encrypted 7,819 documents, which means that there are 7,819 people who believe they were involved in sexual abuse of minors," Warren said on January 30.
According to this professor at the University of Virginia, in the documents she was able to identify 12,254 victims.
The 'boy scouts' remove the 'boy' to integrate the girls
The Spanish 'scout' movement will open a complaint box for victims of pedophilia
Boy Scouts of America files for bankruptcy after facing hundreds of sexual abuse accusations
The Boy Scouts of the USA registered 7,819 alleged pedophiles since the 1940s
Paul Mones, one of the attorneys involved in cases against the Boy Scouts for nearly two decades, told
The New York Times
on Sunday
that the prevalence of abuses detailed in the cases presented is staggering, but still the 92,700 whistleblowers they could only reflect a fraction of the actual number of victims.
"I knew there were a lot of cases," Mones told
The New York Times
.
"I never considered that it would come close to this number," he added.
The avalanche of lawsuits is a monumental task for the bankruptcy case with which the Boy Scouts intend to reorganize and structure a compensation fund for their victims, for which a judge imposed a November 16 deadline to file an abuse complaint .
In their bankruptcy filing, the Boy Scouts allege they have assets worth $ 1 billion, but they also have a network of local councils that own hundreds of campgrounds and other properties across the country on the shores of lakes or in valleys, where young people are trained in exploration skills or ethical values.
In a statement from the Boy Scouts, the organization noted that it is "devastated by the number of lives affected by past abuse," and stated that for this reason they have initiated an accessible process so that they can claim compensation.
"The response we have seen from the victims has been devastating," insisted the organization, asking for forgiveness.
An organization born in 1910
Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts expanded after receiving a Congressional Charter in 1916 that detailed
Scout
values such
as “patriotism, courage, and independence,” by which generations of American boys were guided.
According to the organization, more than 130 million of them have passed through its programs throughout its history, including personalities such as former President John F. Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong, civil rights icon Ernest Green or the director movie Steven Spielberg.
Today, it has about 2.2 million members, although the number has been in steady decline since it peaked in the 1970s of about five million.
In 2017 they started accepting girls.
According to internal documents of the organization, already in the first decades of existence of the Boy Scouts abuse problems were reported, in which there are hundreds of "degenerates" who had served as
scout
leaders
.