The family of a California boy who was allegedly sexually abused is suing the Boy Scouts of America, accusing one of the country’s oldest and most heralded youth organizations of nurturing a “culture of hidden sexual abuse" that conceals “pedophilic wolves,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In addition to seeking unspecified damages in the civil lawsuit, the family claims a local Scouts official’s hesitancy to call police after the incident in 2007 proves that the organization was trying to conceal the case.
"He said that wasn't necessary, because the Scouts do their own internal investigation," said the boy's mother, whose name is not being published by Times. "I thought that was really weird. ... I thought it was really important to call the sheriff right away."
Boy Scouts ready to fight
The Irving, Texas-based group is preparing for a torrent of scrutiny in the wake of a ruling last month by the Santa Barbara County Superior Court that ordered the Boy Scouts to hand over the last 20 years’ worth of records with victims’ names redacted. The files won't be made public, the Times reported. The deadline is one week away.
"These files exist solely to keep out individuals whose actions are inconsistent with the standards of Scouting, and Scouts are safer because of them," Deron Smith, public relations director of Boy Scouts of America, told the Times.
But Tim Cole, a Santa Barbara attorney for the boy, said the documents will uncover a fountainhead of sexual abuse cases.
“Our understanding is there are going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 to 4,000 files for that period for ’91 to the present. Each one of those files represents a separate perpetrator who the scouts received word or notice of was committing childhood sexual abuse,” said Cole, according to HLN affiliate KLRD in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Case origins stretch back to 2007
The case that kicked it all off was that of then-Scout leader Al Steven Stein, 29, who was charged with abusing the boy previously mentioned and two others. In 2009, Stein struck a deal: He pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment and was put on probation. As a climax to the criminal case, he was later imprisoned after law enforcement officials said they found photos of naked children stored on his cellphone data card.
Today he is a “sad case” who resides in a Salinas motel with other sex offenders, Steven Balash, his attorney in the criminal case and the lawsuit, told the Times. "Al is probably at the way far end of having done anything serious. I don't know where the damages are."
The damage has persisted for the boy, now 17. His mother says, according to the Times, that he rarely leaves home and was ostracized by other Boy Scouts when he reported the abuse. "He's not the person he was before," she was quoted as saying.
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