Context: I was a Boy Scout for a number of years, making Eagle in 2020 right as COVID was really kicking off.
It was right afterwards, however, that the CSA scandal started popping up everywhere (which thankfully I was never exposed to or involved in during my time), and lately it seems like the organization & movement as a whole has fallen by the sociocultural wayside.
I would say that my time as a Scout did me objective good; I learned a decent amount about first-aid & survival-craft, participated in a number of volunteer & civic projects, and it generally made me a more well-rounded person. However, there’s no denying the impact that something “bigger than the Catholic Church scandal”, as I’ve heard it described, has on an institution such as this.
I’d like to get the community’s opinion, however; were any of you Scouts? How was your experience? What is your opinion of the institution today?
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.