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Leave No Trace: A Hidden History of the Boy Scouts (2022)
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| Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.53 GiB | 1 | 0 | 332 |
For more than a century, the Boy Scouts of America was a powerful institution aimed at empowering young people to make “ethical and moral choices.” But repeated lawsuits over sex abuse claims scouts say they suffered in scouting and the court-ordered release of decades of internal Boy Scouts of America records cataloguing abuse allegations led to institutional disgrace and bankruptcy.
ABC News Studios partners with Imagine Documentaries and Vermilion Films to present “Leave No Trace: A Hidden History of The Boy Scouts.” The film examines financial records, court documents and firsthand survivor accounts to dissect a coverup of sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America.
After premiering at the Tribeca Festival on June 9, “Leave No Trace” is set to stream on Hulu and in select theaters on Thursday, June 16.
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My experience with Scouting
I was in Venturers, the Canadian organization for boys just older than Boy Scouts. The web sites says it was for ages 15-17, but I was 14, so maybe they changed it?
Anyway, we hardly had any meetings. About 6 months after I joined, we went on a 4 day canoe trip with a bunch of Scouts. By the first evening us Venturers (4 canoes of 2 each, leader included) were way ahead, so we camped by ourselves, downriver from the Scouts. Each canoe had our own tent. After we made a fire and cooked and ate supper, the people in the 3 other canoes went straight to bed and stayed there, giggling and doing whatever, until the morning! I thought it was very strange because it wasn't even 8:00pm, let alone dark outside. WTF? The leader shared his tent with a Venturer who couldn't have been more than 15. The guy I was with (who had convinced me to join) seemed a little bummed out (pardon the pun) that I didn't join him in the tent.
Other than that incident, I never saw any other hints that my Venturer troop was a nest of faggotry and pedophilia. There weren't any more meetings (at least that I was aware of), and the guy who convinced me to join never mentioned Venturers again. I never asked him either, because quite frankly, I was pretty grossed out by them, TBH. I moved away the following year. Years afterwards my brother ran into the guy, getting the impression he was coming onto him.
Scouts and boy brigade
I was in a church-based boy group/brigade for a year or two, and besides having to memorize bible verses and do other random things like playing games and going on little outings, I certainly don't remember any hanky panky. But it looks like, at least in America with a huge organization full of boys, much like Catholic churches and their altar boys, the few "bad apples" and pedophiles and/or hebephiles couldn't stay away. It's too bad the entire organization is defunct and bankrupt now, but on the other hand modern kids are too busy playing on TikTok to care much about scouting anymore anyways!
badges.
Did you get a badge?
fluffy wrote:
Kids laughing in a tent means they are buggering one another? that's some stretch of logic...?!
I went from beavers to cubs to scouts, and my whole family was involved in scouts in some way. while for me I peaked at cubs in terms of 'fitting in' with the others, i certainly learned a lot about camping in scouts. even cold weather camping in canada.
I didn't share tents with others, but we built lean-to's and slept four or six inside, beside one another for body heat in dead of winter.
in cubs we also had a log cabin where the entire troop would sleep. no real privacy for anybody there.
it was a lot of fun.
i agree with the corsair that today's kids cannot be pulled away from the devices long enough to enjoy that space of freedom.
but my scouting experience, while it tapered off in later years because i just didn't fit in socially anymore, was very positive. i got many badges. heck, it teaches you great things about surviving in the wilderness and being independend. you can get off grid with many of its lessons.
also, the title is deep. for those who never grew up with scouts, one of its lessons (from baden powell) was to leave nature as untouched as you found it, ie 'leave no trace'.
i will skip this documentary. badseeds do not make the orchard, in my mind. i had decent leaders and a decent community. sad that others had shite ones.
Documentary
I definitely agree with this. I don't know the statistics, but I am sure the incidents of sexual abuse in the boy scouts was fairly small in comparison to what was normally going on. But an important point that the documentary makes, after getting access to hidden internal documents of abuse that the BSA kept secret for decades, is that perpetrators were quietly fired and moved to other areas without anyone being told about what happened i.e. the police, the families of victims etc. So that part was definitely conspiratorial in nature, and the basic premise of this film.
euxalot wrote:
It's sad that you would prefer to insult my intelligence than acknowledge truth. Here is what I wrote:
I was there. You weren't. I heard what they were doing. It is obvious to anyone with basic common sense that these children were homosexuals, groomed by a homosexual pedophile adult. They were all in on it. I was the outsider because I was a heterosexual. I'm sure plenty of others who preceded me also quit when they realized what was going on; this would explain why the troop was unusually small (7 Venturers, one leader) in a city of over 100,000.
I just realized something else: the few times we had meetings, it was in the leader's house; never at a church or community centre. There was only one leader - that too is unusual. Holy crap! Maybe this creep was misleading Scouts Canada. I did go on one outing which was great: a military firing range where we got to shoot .22 rifles all afternoon.
I was in Wolf Cubs, and had a lot of fun, becoming a sixer and earning almost every badge and all the stars. I wasn't in Scouts because there wasn't a local troop where we lived at the time. Obviously when Scouting was more popular, the percentage of pedophile predators was lower. As its popularity waned, that percentage grew, especially since the administration would cover their tracks. Sexual predators go where their prey is. These are indisputable facts. To pretend otherwise is to betray the truth while enabling the criminals.
The documentary shows how thousands of pedophile Scout masters were quietly dismissed and their crimes covered up. No Police, not even notifying the parents. There was a policy of covering up criminal perversion going all the way back to 1922. That is the issue; nobody is disputing that pedophiles are a minority. Silence is complicity.
Boy scouts
I always knew about the Catholic church and their priest's problems, but I didn't realize until recently that the boy scouts also had a problem. Up until the mid-1980s, I think the world at large was still a little bit naive when it came to pedophiles and sexual predators. But nowadays it has reached a fever pitch of almost complete hysteria. A fair and balanced middle ground is always the best way to approach most problems, I guess...