ON MY HONOR

Thoroughgoing exposé of the Boy Scouts’ long-unacknowledged history of sexual abuse and subsequent bankruptcy.

Working with a fellow reporter, Christensen knocked on doors and examined hidden archives in order to find himself “peering into a Pandora’s box of sexual abuse involving thousands of Boy Scouts victimized by their leaders and betrayed by the nation’s preeminent youth group.” That number grew as advocacy groups, formed along the lines of support groups for victims of clerical abuse, entered a complex legal fray: In the end, some 82,000 former Boy Scouts sued, and to date, Christensen writes, the adjudicated payout has amounted to a mere $7.9 million. He writes that the Boy Scouts had long known of sexual abusers among the ranks of its adult leaders, keeping files, most recently, on more than 5,000 “ineligible volunteers,” many of whom were nonetheless able to sign on as scoutmasters; these “IV files,” he adds, predominantly concerned cases of “perversion.” These secret files—“secret,” he writes, being a term the Scouts shun, preferring the legalistic “confidential”—are incomplete, since they were purged to ostensibly “protect the privacy of victims, witnesses, and anyone falsely accused of sexual abuse.” As the instances of provable sexual abuse grew, Christensen writes, the Scouts lost a huge number of members, despite the organization’s reversal of long-standing prohibitions against gay and female Scouts (agnostics and atheists still need not apply)—a reversal that in turn cost the organization the support of the Mormon church, the leading contributor of both Scouts and money, such that “425,000 Mormon Boy Scouts had decamped, likely never to return.” Though the Scouts’ parent organization tested many legal maneuvers, the courts finally ruled against the group, forcing bankruptcy—even though, Christensen reckons, it still has “net assets of nearly $1 billion.”

A vigorous takedown of a supposed moral exemplar.