Over 80,000 complaints of sexual abuse against …

More than 82,600 people reported being abused by members of the Boy Scouts of the United States, revealed the diary New York Times. This Monday was the deadline set by the Delaware court for victims to file a complaint. In February, the organization filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to freeze all claims. by former Boy Scouts in court and redirect them to a compensation fund. By that time, 12,000 complaints had been received, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.

“I knew there were a lot of cases, but I never expected an amount like this,” admitted attorney Paul Mones, who has been handling cases involving Boy Scouts for 20 years. And he warned that the reported situations could only represent a part of the total number of victims of abuse committed by the organization.

Among the complaints filed, there are from all the states of the country of North America, and the victims are currently between 8 and 93 years old, which gives an idea of ​​the continuity of abuse throughout the 110 year history of the Boy Scouts. The vast majority of complainants are men, but there are also women who claim to have been abused by members of the organization who did not allow the girls to enter until 2017.

Disclosures of sexual abuse within the organization first came to light in 2012, when Los Angeles Times released internal documents covering decades of sexual abuse within its ranks.

It was then about 5,000 “perversion files”, corresponding to a similar number of alleged aggressors among the Scout leaders. Most have never been reported to the authorities and the organization has limited itself to deporting them.

Since then, legal proceedings against scouts have increased, especially after the multi-state extension of the statute of limitations for pedophile assaults.

It’s a statement, The Boy Scouts were “devastated by the number of lives affected by past abuse,” apologizing and explaining that their intention is to put in place a simple process so that victims can seek redress. When declaring bankruptcy, the organization explained that it had assets worth around $ 1,000 million to which must be added the properties of the entity’s network of territorial subsidiaries.

Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts have welcomed some 130 million young Americans. It currently has around two million members, ranging in age from 5 to 21, but by the 1970s it had grown to nearly five million.