The other article Peterson refers to was allegedly written in consultation with a statistician, but I doubt any qualified statistician would agree with her claims. The author is a mental health counselor who joined the LDS church three years ago. Her description of the database is woefully incomplete and misleading.
There is no publicly available way to access all of those claims right now; perhaps someday, when the settlement process is over, there will be. However, the Boy Scouts have kept records of abuse happening in their ranks for almost 80 years in a system officially called “The Ineligible Volunteer Files,” but colloquially referred to as the P-Files. P for perversion. A database of these files was created by the L.A. Times and can be viewed online. The oldest file goes back to 1947, and there are 5400 of them.
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Each file contains the name of the adult leader, some basic information about him (there are a handful of women in the database, but it’s 99% men), a summary of the abuse that is alleged, any relevant correspondence or legal documents, newspaper clippings, victim statements, photographs, and more. So, with some digging, it is possible to determine the percentage of abusers who came from a specific region, or a certain decade, or from troops sponsored by particular groups, including Latter-day Saint abuse.
About half of the files list the man’s religion, and almost all of them list the sponsoring agency. If a specific religion was listed, they were sorted based on those identifying cases of Latter-day Saint abuse. If religion was not listed, but the troop’s sponsoring agency was listed, they were placed into the same categories. Files that listed neither religion nor sponsoring agency (25 total in my sample) were thrown out since it was impossible to confirm if they were affiliated with any church. We then replaced those with 25 randomly drawn files that did contain the needed information.
Here is a link to the database:
https://spreadsheets.latimes.com/boyscouts-cases/
And here is what the page itself says about the database:
This database contains information on about 5,000 men and a handful of women who were expelled from the Boy Scouts of America between 1947 and January 2005 on suspicion of sexual abuse. The dots on the map indicate the location of troops connected in some way to the accused. The timeline below shows the volume of cases opened by year; however, an unknown number of files were purged by the Scouts prior to the early 1990s. The data are derived from confidential Scouting files submitted as evidence in court cases.
But, if you click the link labeled More About this Database, you learn this:
There are three main sources for the database: about 1,900 files from 1970 to 1991 produced as evidence in a 1992 Californiafornia lawsuit; about 1,200 case files from an overlapping time period — 1965 to 1985 — released on order of the Oregon Supreme Court; and summary data on about 3,100 additional files from 1947 to January 2005. Both the case summaries and the 1970-to-1991 files were provided to the Los Angeles Times by plaintiffs’ attorney Timothy Kosnoff. Taken together, the database accounts for all of the Boy Scouts’ surviving files as of January 2005. An unknown number of files were destroyed by the Boy Scouts between the 1970s and the 1990s, and an unknown number of additional cases have been created since 2005.
Under “Document,” The Times has posted links to redacted case files where they are available. In cases marked “Pending,” the document is still being redacted and will be posted soon. In cases marked “Not available,” the document has not been released publicly by the Boy Scouts of America.
In many of the incidents described, no criminal charges were filed, meaning the allegations were never heard in court. Case files released by the court have victims’ names and identifying information redacted, a standard also used by The Times.
[Still typing......]
First thing to notice -- this database does not include any reports of sexual abuse made to the BSA in the last 19 years. Why is that significant? Because that is the period during which adults who were abused as children were coming forward to file lawsuits as states lengthened the period of or removed the statute of limitations for civil cases of child sexual abuse. It is during this period that child victims of past sexual abuse that had been covered up by adults were most likely to reveal what had happened to them as children.
But the database itself is even less complete than that. Over half of the entries list no more than the subject's name, city, state and troop number. For those entries, it is impossible to tell who chartered the unit without doing research that she doesn't say that she did. Rather, she claims that chartering entity was identified in most of the records. That could be true only of the fewer than half of entries that included additional documentation.
And, even worse, those bare bones entries are highly skewed towards recent claims. There is no documentation for any entry dated after 1991. Of the 5000 records, the most recent 2300 have no documentation at all.
Given the information that the article's author is looking for, there is no way that she made a random selection from the entire database. At best, she randomly selected from reports made to BSA over 30 years ago. Keep in mind that that the scandal in Boston, which brought the scandal to the public's attention, was in 2002.
The Times also tells us that the BSA records were purged at various times before 1991. We don't know which records were purged and why.
Finally, I spot checked a few records that included documentations. I could not find the troop sponsors that the author says was in most of the entries. The files generally contained correspondence between the relevant Council and the national organization, but I didn't find any that identified the troop. Also, the religion of the subject may not accurately reflect the sponsoring agency of the troop at the time abuse occurred. For example, a few of the records I reviewed were generated when an individual applied to be a scoutmaster of a specific troop. The troop for which the application was taken was identified, but when the basis for denial of the application was abuse in connection with a previous troop, the sponsor of the earlier troop was not identified. [ETA: I looked at a few more files and found BSA report forms that have a space for the sponsoring agency. Either I missed it when I first looked or there are versions of the form that do not include this information.]
The article is based on the author's assumption that the BSA records are representative of the rate of actual abuse in scout troops. It's clearly not. The records she used omit any reports of abuse after 1991 and have been partially purged. She also assumes that LDS scouts would report sexual abuse to an adult at the same rate as non-LDS scouts and that this information would be passed on to the BSA at the same rates by LDS and non-LDS troops. Given anecdotal reports of how LDS families and leaders responded to accusations of sexual abuse over 30 years ago, there is reason not to simply assume that reporting rates were the same.
Here's an example from one of the entries in the database. I sorted by state for Utah and took the first one that came up (alphabetically, I think.) The file starts with an inquiry about an individual The entry is for Larren Bybee Arnold, 1991, Salt Lake City Utah, No troop number. The file was opened in response to a phone call from someone in the Great Salt Lake Council about the subject, who had reportedly moved to Idaho and may be involved in scouting there. After tracking down relevant information, a letter was sent describing what was found.
So, the Bishop was aware of the molestation of "one or more scouts." But he talked the mother out of filing a lawsuit and does not appear to have informed BSA of the incident(s). Although "all contacts" expressed concern about the subject and sexual molestation, somehow no one got around to letting BSA know that the subject should be disallowed as a scouting volunteer.
The BSA bankruptcy has over 80,000 abuse claims. The Times' database, while giving us a look at how the BSA handled sexual abuse claims over 30 years ago, is not (and does not purport to be) a representative sample of those claims. It also is clearly not a representative sample of all abuse that occurred in scout troops.
The entire article is GIGO. The author should (but will never be) embarrassed.
But, of course, Peterson uses the paper and the report to attack a straw man. The criticism of the LDS church is not that it is a hotbed of sexual abuse. It is its unwillingness to take steps to protect children from predators that end up in positions that give them access to children. It is also examples of situations in which, like the incident discussed above, church leaders fail to take appropriate action to protect children in response to reports of abuse.
