R
alph morsewas 11 years old when the
abuse began in the 1960s. John Brown,
his scoutmaster, a supposedly upstanding
man in his small upstate New York town,
molested him regularly. While looking up
at the constellations to earn merit badges,
Mr Morse remembers, “he’d come up be-
hind you in the dark, pressing himself up
against you in a field. You’re standing in
pitch black with this humongous man tak-
ing hold of you. And what do you do? What
do you say to stop?”
Mr Morse kept the torment to himself,
but is convinced that scout leaders sus-
pected. The emotional scars were long-
lasting. The former honours student
dropped out of school, became an alcoholicand lost a marriage. Mr Brown was eventu-
ally arrested two decades later for abusing
another boy.
Last year Mr Morse filed a lawsuit
against the Boy Scouts of America (bsa) un-
der New York’s new Child Victims Act. This
law changed the statute of limitations for
prosecuting and filing civil suits against
abusers and their affiliated institutions. It
also included a one-year window during
which victims can seek damages, no mat-
ter when the abuse occurred. More than a
dozen states passed similar laws. Schools,
hospitals, the Catholic church and other
religious groups have all been sued under
the new bills. The bsahas received about
275 suits, including accusations dating
from the 1940s, and expects more. Its po-
tential liability is huge. It spent more than
$150m on settlements and legal fees in
2017-19 alone. It filed for bankruptcy on
February 18th.
More than 130m people have taken part
in bsayouth programmes, including sever-
al presidents (Gerald Ford was an Eagle
Scout). Boys were told that their Boy Scout
manual was, next to the Bible, the most im-
portant book they would ever own. But
membership has been falling, from 6.5m in
1972 to just 2.2m today. After years of resist-
ing, the 110-year-old bsanow welcomes
girls, as well as transgender and gay scouts.
That decision pushed the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints to end its rela-
tionship with the organisation on Decem-
ber 31st, removing 400,000 Mormon
scouts and much-needed revenue.
The Boy Scouts are not disappearing.
Nineteen Catholic dioceses have filed for
bankruptcy and are still standing. But like
them the bsa, which owns thousands of
acres of land, may have to sell property.
The current leaders seem sincere in
wanting to help. In an open letter to victims
Jim Turley, the national chairman, apolo-
gised, saying “We believe you, we believe in
compensating you.” Last week the Scouts
announced a partnership with 1in6, a non-
profit that helps victims of sexual abuse.
But the organisation has known about
abuse going back nearly a century, even
creating an internal secret file called “P”
(for perversion), to track leaders and volun-
teers accused of child sexual abuse. In 1935
the then head of the bsatold the New York
Timesthat almost 1,000 men had been re-
moved from Scouting because they “some-
times give way to temptation”.
Chapter 11 will allow the bsa to put mon-
ey for victims into a shared pot so that
everyone receives compensation, accord-
ing to Marie Reilly, a law professor at Penn-
sylvania State University. Still, some of the
abuse survivors are upset about the bank-
ruptcy filing. A lawsuit was their chance to
speak. “I’ve been silent for 50 years,” says
Mr Morse. “The bankruptcy is just their get-
out-of-jail-free card.” 7NEW YORK
A century-old institution succumbs to
a deluge of child-abuse lawsuitsBoy Scouts of America enters Chapter 11Scout’s
(dis)honour
30 United States The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2 calls the horror of diagnosing children
with “invasive Hib”, an aggressive strain of
meningitis. Recovery was agonising, and
parents would be traumatised. Worse, it
killed some 1,000 American children a
year. Then a Hib vaccine was licensed in
1987 and almost magically, within a few
years, it had all but gone. Now barely 40
cases are identified in America each year.
The problem is that people forget, with-
in a generation or two, the illnesses that
once stalked them. In America he counts at
least 14 vaccines that have eradicated, or
nearly, diseases including tetanus, diph-
theria, mumps and rubella, polio, hepatitis
and smallpox. He points out how, before
mass vaccinations in the 1960s, measles
sent 50,000 infected children to hospital
each year, and typically killed 500 of them.
Yet anti-vaxxers brush aside measles as
trivial (though in 2018, around the world,
the disease killed over 140,000 people). In
the past decade the anti-vax movement has
only grown stronger, warns Mr Hotez.
Though most American parents still vacci-
nate their children, pockets of scepticism
and vaccine refusal are growing. Misin-
formed celebrities are stirring up fear—
none more than Robert F. Kennedy junior, a
charismatic environmental campaigner
turned vaccine obsessive. Online, compa-
nies profit by seeding doubts about sci-
ence, then selling homeopathic and “natu-
ral” remedies. Firms like Amazon and
Facebook meanwhile fail to discourage
those who spread lies on their platforms.
He worries that a new outfit, the Chil-
dren’s Health Defence, founded by Mr Ken-
nedy, looks especially slick and able to stir
mistrust of vaccines. A study this year by
Vaccine, an academic journal, found just
two anti-vax campaigns, including Mr
Kennedy’s, paid for over half of all Face-
book ads that were tracked as spreading
misinformation on vaccine safety.
Officials, doctors and scientists do push
back, hoping to educate parents by sharing
worthy statistics on vaccine safety. That
has limited impact. Tara Smith, at Kent
State University, who studied how to ad-
dress the spectrum of outright vaccine de-
niers, the vaccine-hesitant and merely cu-
rious “lurkers”, says parents almost never
lack facts. Instead they are stirred by emo-
tional anecdotes, especially the most egre-
gious tales of patient harm. Mr Hotez ar-
gues for fighting back harder. “We need
people to get emotionally involved,” he
says. He equates anti-vaxxers to a destruc-
tive, religious cult and wants scientists to
deliver direct, “declarative”, even confron-
tational messages against them. Worried
parents remember and share stories, not
statistics, he says. Mr Hotez, whose own
daughter is autistic, has written a memoir
explaining that vaccines did not cause the
condition, as a large number of parents
have come to believe.Ideally, he says, someone would fund
his plan for a pro-vaccine group to counter
outfits like Mr Kennedy’s, and to press tech
firms and online retailers to act. Anti-vax
books, films, posters and other merchan-
dise proliferate online. Until The Economist
pointed it out last week, Amazon was tak-
ing payment to promote the sale (for $7.95)
of a sponsored sticker that urged “Just say
no to vaccines.” Amazon removed that, but
also says it will not censor free speech. Mr
Hotez calls the site the source of the “most
pervasive and active” misinformation that
helps anti-vaxxers. 7