Marcos Adrian Arevalo, a Mexican Exchange Counselor for the Boy Scouts of America, was arrested and charged with indecent liberties involving a minor in 1985, in Tacoma, Washington. A 12-year-old Scout had reported to a friend in his Troop and his mother that Arevalo had sexually molested him on a Boy Scout camping trip when the two were sleeping in a tee-pee with another Scout.
The incident occurred at Camp Hahobas, a Boy Scout camp operated by the Mount Rainier Council of the Boy Scouts of America in Tacoma.
What is particularly disturbing about this case is that, despite the active involvement of the Boy Scouts from the very beginning – both the Scoutmaster and Camp Director were interviewed by the police – the national office of the BSA did not put Arevalo on its list of “Ineligible Volunteers” or create an “IV File” on Arevalo until 1991, six and a half years after the victim reported the abuse.
Just as there is nothing in the IV File to explain why it took the BSA six and a half years to bar Arevelo from Scouting, there is nothing in the file about the outcome of the criminal case. One of the many weaknesses of the BSA’s Ineligible Volunteer file system is that there is no commonly understood method for updating the files.
Oddly, the IV File contains three separate letters, all written in 1985 during the police investigation, from the minor victim’s elementary school teachers testifying to his good character. Why were those necessary? They seem to indicate a response to some effort to blame the victim for the incident, a sadly typical occurrence in sexual abuse cases.
Finally, there is nothing in in Arevalo’s IV File to indicate that the BSA or the Mount Rainier Council made any effort to learn is Arevalo had taken similar “indecent liberties” with other Scouts while he was working at Camp Hahobas.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy in the Boy Scouts’ sad history of Scout molestation is that, whenever an adult volunteer was kicked out for sexually abusing child Scouts, the organization had no policy or system for notifying the families of other boys who may have been victims of the same perpetrator.