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?
In girl scouts we just sold cookies, or met to talk about the cookies, or for our moms to get the cookies.
So with the child rape on the boys end, and exploitation on the girls end, I’d say it’s not good. I wouldn’t trust a man involved in leading boy scouts with my kids. I mean, my sons elementary school coach just got fired for staring at 5th grade girls, and they look for that kind of thing hard-core before hiring.
It’s cool you could do that and didn’t get raped like the other boys, but your family could have been teaching you how to exist in nature and do neat things.
It’s not something that fits with the world we have now, the world is more “caters to the predator,” rather than “let’s do something nice for the kids.”
The cookie thing seems to weird from the perspective of german scouting. Like: Does everything american have to be bussiness? And for the boys the focus on merit for hierarchy is not something, that I would want to have for my future kids. One thing said again and again by parents here is, that we give an opportunity to do something without the kids having to perform. Most other organizations here are sports clubs.
Honestly, I believe we need both the family and the external youth organizations. When done way better, scouts can also prevent abuse happening in the family (or at least sounding an alarm). With all the abuse happening in the family context different places are also important.