I think like a lot of things in life there are good troops and bad troops. I was lucky enough to be in two really great troops and are still friends with most of them even today almost 15 years later.

my friends were Scouts but I was always too poor and my homelife was too unpredictable to be in any kind of organization with the kind of commitment requirements that Scouts required.

My friends in the early 90s that were in Scouts had a Scout Master that they all considered to be a creepy pedo. So its not anything new. Anytime there is young people and adults without proper supervision, this is bound to happen.

The priest that baptized me was a pedo and to make it even worse, he was moved away from a chruch when it came to light that he was molesting children

AND THEY MOVED HIM TO MY CHURCH. WHICH WAS ALSO A GRADE SCHOOL / JUNIOR HIGH

Let that sink in.

Right around the time that he “retired” one of my schoolmates just disappeared from school too. I have always wondered if that was connected.

Yeah, I don’t go to Mass anymore. I don’t do church anymore.

I was a Boy Scout some years ago. I think as a programme to get young boys interested in outdoor activities it worked pretty well. As for the paedophilia scandals, I think they were intrinsic to how the group is organised. Their decentralised model that relies on volunteer scoutmasters is very prone to infiltration by people who have no business being around children and difficult to police because they can’t actually supervise each individual troop but are still legally responsible for them.

I also think they sort of lost the plot with their whole transgender nonsense and their pivot to the “Scouting America” brand. Their exclusion of transgender boys and heavy emphasis on religion indicated a severe failure to get with the times. Transitioning from the Boy Scouts of America to “Scouting America” is giving up on their core model of being an organisation that serves primarily boys.

Don’t take this in a bigoted way, I’m saying this not because I think gender segregation is good, but their core customer base (if you want to call it that) is teenage boys, and there’s an allure to that demographic in being a part of an organisation that is designed to serve boys, seeing that the Girl Scouts are also a thing. The Boy Scouts have a strong anti-radicalising effect because they teach boys to be accepting of others with differences and to be open minded and learn from them. And girls sorta know that Scouting America isn’t really for them, seeing that 80% of its membership consists of boys and the membership of the Girl Scouts USA (which is practically 100% girls) outnumber the female members of the BSA 5 to 1. So what’s left is an organisation which boys think isn’t for them, and girls also think isn’t for them. So who’s it for, really?

I can’t go this long without acknowledging that for every failure of the former Boy Scouts of America, there is a corresponding success of the Girl Scouts USA. The Girl Scouts is far more secular as an organisation to begin with, and they are also more progressive in that they accepted transgender girls over half a decade earlier than the Boy Scouts, who pretty much had to be dragged kicking into the 21st century. I remember in my Boy Scout handbook a line which said, roughly, that “the BSA is a secular organisation, meaning we don’t tell you how to worship, however, we believe boys cannot be their best selves without finding their connection with God.” And even 13-year-old me knew that was a load of doublespeak rubbish. The BSA was a deeply religious organisation. Boy Scout events had organised prayers and they said grace before every meal at the camps. There is a difference between acknowledging the religion of what may be a majority of your participants, and trying to nudge the remainder into it, and I think the BSA fell on the wrong side of that line.

So while I think the BSA was an imperfect organisation, I still think it’s a shame to see its decline.

I’m have three kids in scouting and I’m an ASM myself. I find it’s very dependant on the troop. I didn’t have a very good experience as a kid with mine, so I didn’t think I’d bring my kids into it. But when they were interested, we found a troop that turned out to be everything mine wasn’t as a kid. We accepted girls before it was officially allowed, and we’ve built a very strong, open and positive community. Enough that when they asked me to become an ASM, I happily accepted since my opinion of scouts had completely turned around.

There are still some pockets of the old guard that don’t like the direction of scouting these days. But with a good troop, it can be an amazing experience. My kids have grown and learned so much from their involvement. Me too.

Former UK beaver, cub and scout. I loved being in the scouts and don’t have a bad word to say about it.

In hindsight though, its like it was set up to give pedos easy access to kids. I know they check the criminal records of adults involved but thats more of a box-ticking exercise. I don’t know what the solution is.

Life scout here. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was a huge positive force on my childhood and created lifelong friendships.

Yes, I was a scout when I was a kid and consider it a valuable experience.

Yes, I also encouraged my kids to sign up and I believe they had good/valuable experience as well. Some of that overlapped the scandal, but as an actively involved parent , I didn’t really see where things could go wrong.

One of the differences (maybe this is specific to our pack/troop) was no burgers and dogs allowed on campouts because they’re too easy: you’re not learning anything. They were really good about different experiences and learning

To the contrary, the response to the scandal was really frustrating. Scouting was pretty strict that there must always be a second adult involved in any activity. I get the reason, but for example, I couldn’t supervise cooking on the grill in public in the middle of camp in front of dozens of witnesses, unless there was a second adult?

Mid-2010s Eagle Scout here. I think Boy Scouts as a whole did teach me a lot of genuinely important skills, both physical and mentally, but that was mostly due in my opinion to my troop being more unconventionally scout-ran compared to the other troops in our council, which leaned more adult-ran. We had pretty much free reign over our itinerary and direction as a troop, so if decided we didn’t want to do something or we wanted to, but didn’t plan for it, it didn’t happen. The inverse with stuff we wanted to do and then it happening was also true. That taught me a lot more about life than any merit badge or rank advancement could.

Unfortunately being an Eagle Scout isn’t something I always bring up when talking about myself. I think part of it is all the scandals that went public like you said, but also another part is, again in my experience, “Boy Scout” carries a message about my ideals and politics that aren’t actually in line with my ideals and politics. Either you were really into nature (minority) or you were really into the wrong side of WWII (majority).

like a log of orgs like this I feel the parent orgs take to much from the locals when fund raising. the basic idea is good but its hard to do stuff like this without abuse. The real question is how they handle it when they find out.

Military recruitment program.

I was in scouts very briefly. Our troop/chapter/whatever it was lasted less than a year because the scout leaders were caught embezzling funds and everything got shut down.

From my limited experience in scouts, I found it boring.

My son has been in Cub Scouts for a few years and I help lead the pack. It’s been good for him and his friends, but fuck nationals. If our local pack agreed with the national organization’s right-wing politics and religious mandate I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. But we make it pretty clear to the parents that we just ignore the rules that we think are not in line with our values.

I don’t love being part of an org with values that contradict ours, but If we abandon every problematic organization it will be very hard to find things to be a part of. And we can discuss with the kids the things that we don’t agree with, and also work from within the organization to improve it. If nationals ever came down on us we would probably just join one of the other scouting organizations that doesn’t hold right-wing views. And if the rest of the pack leader is caved to nationals I would pull my son out of the program.

Cub Scouts has a reasonably good education program for keeping kids safe from abuse, and it’s a requirement each year for parents to discuss these things with their kids. So most of the conversations I’ve had with my son about abuse has been because the Cub Scouts require it. In that sense, I feel like it has prepared him somewhat to get himself out of a bad situation if he ever find himself in one.

We’ll see if he wants to continue at the troop level. I will support him if he wants to, and the conversations we’ve had due to Cub Scouts make it less likely that anything abusive will happen while he’s camping with them.

I was a Brownie when I was a kid (80s), I thought we were going to go like camping and stuff like the boy scouts, but all we did was needlepoint inside all summer so I never went back.

I think it’s great!

Boy scouts need to find something better to sell than popcorn to match the girl scout cookies.