BSA Sends Out Notice about New Registration Fee that is Nearly Double the Old One
With rapidly increasing numbers of sexual abuse lawsuits flooding into the courts, the Boy Scouts of America announced that it will now cost almost double to become a Boy Scout of America. The infamous organization sent out a letter to BSA leaders across the nation that membership feels will rise from $33 to $60 starting Jan. 1, blaming the “cost of insurance” for the fee increase.
“Everybody knows what this is really all about,” said Charles Greinsky, vice president of the Staten Island Council Boy Scouts of America. “This is about the pedophiles and the insurance we have to pay because of these pedophiles and the fact that the Scouts knew about many of them for years.”
Greinsky has been involved in the Boy Scouts of America since 1963 and called the price increase “horrendous”, saying the Boy Scouts have been “mismanaged at the national level” for years.
Greinsky’s complaints of mismanagement are not unfounded as more claims of Scouting abuse flood into the spotlight. Since the organization’s founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has kept thousands of reports of sexual abuse within Scouting programs and filed them away from the public eye in what are now called the “Perversion Files.”
The Los Angeles Times examined over 1,600 of these files and discovered that the Boy Scouts of America and failed to report most of these sexual predators to the police. In many of these cases, the Boy Scout of America even covered the tacks of sexual predators through quiet dismissals.
“Any amount of money you pay this organization (for membership) is foolish because they have not proven they care enough about protecting children,” said Andrew Van Arsdale, an attorney part of the movement known as Abused in Scouting.
Abused in Scouting, a movement representing Scouting abuse survivors, represents 1,325 men from across the U.S. all saying they were abused while in the Boy Scouts of America. Johnny Austin, a Scouting survivor represented by Abused in Scouting, is ready to sue the Boy Scouts for the abuse he endured as a child and can now pursue justice with the opening of new laws.
Austin reported to the New York Post that the increased membership fee says the Boy Scouts “know they have a fight coming and they heard from their attorneys what that fight will cost them. … I advise those parents who are thinking of paying an organization double to cover up all the horrible, disgusting so-called men that prey on your children to think again.”
New York passed the Child Victims Act in February of this year and opened a one-year “lookback” window” for survivors to bring forward old child sex abuse cases. Hundreds of Scouting, Catholic clergy, and institutional sex abuse survivors have come forward in the recent months to pursue justice against institutions that failed to protect children from sexual predators.