The NBC News affiliate WAFF in Huntsville, Alabama recently interviewed me concerning the history of the Boy Scouts’ Ineligible Volunteer or “Perversion” Files and the successful outcome before the Oregon Supreme Court in forcing the Boy Scouts to make these internal documents public. The release of these files is one of the biggest breakthrough in child safety in the last few decades.
As I explained to WAFF reporter Margo Gray: “The Perversion Files constitute the largest single body of knowledge of how pedophiles operate, how they’re drawn to where the children are, how they pick the children to be their victims – and that was an enormous untapped resource because the Boy Scouts had never made those files public. The Boy Scouts don’t tell troops about the file system, they don’t tell families about them, don’t tell scouts that these files exist.”
Among other things, the Boy Scouts of America’s Ineligible Volunteer files (also called the Perversion Files) show how the Boy Scouts allowed some alleged abusers to resign quietly and put others on membership “probation,” only to have these men molest and exploit other children.
As a sex abuse attorney who has represented survivors all over the country, I know the institutional documents are key to any successful outcome and crucial in protecting children in the future. No problem as big as that of sexual abuse of children by adult Scout volunteers can be solved unless the full history and scope of the problem is known. The Perversion Files give us a window into that.
These internal documents provide the public and child safety advocates, such as myself, with the information necessary to understand how cover-ups were perpetrated and how these same institutions were more concerned with protecting their public image than the well-being of children.