Boy Scouts to report suspected pedophiles to police

Kelly Clark, a Portland attorney who won a landmark 2010 lawsuit against the Boy Scouts, says the documents show that even though the Scouts have been collecting the files nearly since the Boy Scouts' founding in 1910, the organization failed to use them to protect boys from pedophiles.

"What's significant is that the Boy Scouts could have these files for so long and not learn from them," Clark said.

Last week, the Scouts made public an internal report they compiled on the files by Warren, the psychiatrist who served as an expert witness for the Scouts in the 2010 Portland lawsuit. As part of the report, they emphasized the files' success in preventing pedophiles from entering Scouting ranks, but acknowledged the organization's failure to stop some abusers.

"In some instances we failed to defend Scouts from those who would do them harm," the Scouts said in a statement accompanying the report. "There have been instances where people misused their positions in Scouting to abuse children, and in certain cases, our response to these incidents and our efforts to protect youth were plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong."

Warren's report found that, of 930 files created between January 1965 and June 1984, there were 1,622 victims. Of the total victims, at least 1,302 were involved in Scouting.

"My review of these files indicates that the reported rate of sexual abuse in Scouting has been very low," Warren wrote in the report.

Warren compared the rate of victimization in the Scouts — about 1.4 to 2.1 youth per 100,000 — to the nationally-reported incidence of child abuse by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which found that in 1980, 70 per 100,000 children experience sexual exploitation each year.

Warren's analysis didn't account for the fact that files were destroyed for offenders who died or turned 75 years old, something she said didn't affect her overall conclusions.

Critics contend the organization's legal battles reflect a long-standing effort to protect the Boy Scouts' reputation, and to try to limit any lawsuits.

"It's a culture of denial and concealment," said Timothy Kosnoff, a Seattle attorney who in 2006 obtained documents on 5,200 alleged pedophiles who went into the files from 1949-2005.

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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

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