Jury Holds Boy Scouts of America Accountable for Sexual Abuse | Dallas, Texas Personal Injury Attorney Blog
An Oregon jury ordered the Boy Scouts of America to pay $18.5 million to a man sexually abused by a former assistant scoutmaster Timur Dykes after Dykes admitted to a Scouts official in 1983 that he had molested 17 boys.
Under Oregon law, most of the money the jury awarded as punitive damages will go to the state and not to the victim. Specifically, Oregan law requires that 60 percent of the punitive damages awarded by the jury go to the state crime victims compensation fund. The verdict is believed to be the largest such award against the organization.
The jury found that the conduct of the Boy Scouts of America was not only negligent, but that its conduct was also reckless and outrageous. During a news conference, some of the jurors noted the Boy Scouts had never apologized to Lewis.
Representatives for the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America declined to comment on details of the case because other cases are pending, but issued a statement saying it maintains a “rigorous” system to screen Scout leaders. The case was the first of six filed against the Boy Scouts in the same court in Oregon, with at least one other separate case pending.
Lawyers for the victim pointed to the fact that the Boy Scouts are nearly a $1 billion corporation that could well afford punitive damages and that such damages would serve as an incentive to deter them from similar conduct in the future. Boyle said from 1984 through 1992, the Scouts were sued at least 60 times for alleged sex abuse with settlements and judgments totaling more than $16 million
During the first phase of the trial, Clark and Mones introduced more than 1,000 files the Scouts kept on suspected child molesters from 1965-85 as evidence the organization should have put a sex abuse prevention program into place decades ago. The Scouts executive now in charge of those files admitted they had never been evaluated or analyzed to help design or determine the effectiveness of a prevention program that is now in place. A number of witnesses testified for the Scouts during the second phase of the trial that they participated in a training and prevention program since at least the late 1980s, but none of those witnesses could explain why the Scouts had not yet made the “youth protection training” program mandatory for its organization.
Sadly, this case points out that it often times takes a lawsuit and a punch to the pocketbook of a corporation before the organization will actually start do the right thing. These organizations, regardless of whether it is the Boy Scouts, a church, a day car, a massage clinic, or some other business, must be held accountable for the people they hire, supervise and retain. They have a duty to conduct thorough background checks. They have a duty to supervise their representatives, and they have a duty not to continue to retain people they know or should know are engaging in inappropriate contact. Hopefully, this case sends a clear message to the Boy Scouts that the protection of all of its scouts is their first responsibility.
Whether it is a case against the Boy Scouts of America, or some of the recent pedophile allegations against the Catholic Church or a local day care center, all of these organizations have a duty to safeguard our children. For years, the Boy Scouts of America has been defending case after case of alleged sexual abuse of its scouts. As the lawyers for the victim in this case pointed out, often there is an air of silence surrounding these incidents and an effort to try to sweep them under the rug. While these organizations are no doubt filled with numbers of great people and great success stories, in the end, these organizations still need to be held accountable for their failures.