The Boy Scouts of America was dogged by sex-abuse claims for more than 50 years before it implemented key child-safety policies in the late 1980s. Now, after more than a dozen states changed their statute-of-limitations laws in 2019 to allow lawsuits based on decades-old allegations, hundreds of men are coming forward to say they were abused decades ago, the Wall Street Journal reported. The approximately 275 resulting suits caused the Boy Scouts to file for bankruptcy protection last week, halting all current cases. The youth group said that it plans to set up a fund through the bankruptcy process to compensate victims. In contrast to the plight of the Catholic Church, which has wrestled with well-publicized claims of sex abuse for decades, the Boy Scouts avoided widespread attention until rather recently. Largely shielding the organization were the nation’s patchwork of statute-of-limitations laws, ineligible volunteer files that were kept confidential and a general unwillingness among young boys to bring forward their accounts of abuse. Public awareness grew with a 2010 case in Oregon in which a jury awarded a man who was sexually abused in the early 1980s with nearly $20 million. The Oregon Supreme Court also ordered the youth organization to release nearly 1,250 confidential files of alleged abusers, bringing more attention to abuse claims in the Boy Scouts.
