Bob Lonsberry

Bob Lonsberry

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LONSBERRY: Boy Scout Council Failed Horribly

Here’s what I don’t get.

               How is it that a reporter for the Syracuse newspaper was able to Google the name “Ronald Rowcliff” and find news accounts of his alleged pedophilia, but the Boy Scouts of America wasn’t?

               Ditto for the Brockport Central School District.

               How can a guy have a pervert paper trail and still end up a scoutmaster and school bus driver?

               And how can he go for two complete summers of camp, allegedly molesting boys left and right, and not get caught until well into the third summer?

               How the hell does that happen?

               How is it you turn a guy loose at Massawepie Scout Camps without doing the due diligence the rest of us do with our babysitters and plumbers? And how do you run those scout camps so recklessly that your two-deep leadership is seemingly ignored and that you are well into your third season of victimization before a scout says something?

               You line those failures up and you become an accomplice to the molestation of young men who you have sworn to protect.

               Don’t get me wrong. The Boy Scouts – of whatever it’s called this month – is an organization that has made a tremendous contribution to our society. Though it has reshaped itself significantly in recent years, to its hurt and to the disappointment of many, I believe it still has much good to offer to America’s sons and daughters.

               But not if it can’t protect them from predators.

               And the recent arrest of Troop 86 Scoutmaster Ron Rowcliff for allegedly molesting several boys between 12 and 14 over the last three summers at scout camp in the Adirondacks is a major failure for the Seneca Waterways Council. The council, headquartered in Rochester, New York, runs the Massawepie Scout Camps, where Ronald Rowcliff was a shotgun instructor in 2017 and 2018, and until he was fired this July.

               He was investigated for inappropriate contact with boys in 1988, and charged with inappropriate conduct in 2000, when he was a Holley police officer. That disappeared into some legal jibberish that basically boiled down to the implication that he showed little boys pornography, and he walked away without being put on the sexual-offender list.

               And that’s what the Seneca Waterways Council of the Boy Scouts of America is pointing at hard – if only its alleged staff pervert had been prosecuted differently 19 years ago, none of this would have happened. These boys would have been protected, if only the cops and courts of two decades ago had done their job.

               That’s what the Boy Scouts are arguing in the court of public opinion.

               And to a degree, they have a point.

               But the malfeasance of the criminal justice system notwithstanding, if the Boy Scout council had done its job, this wouldn’t have happened.

               Again, if a simple Internet search had been made, if his resume and the circumstances of his termination as a police officer had been looked into, he presumably would have been disqualified from either being a Scout leader or a Scout employee. But it sounds like the background examination is nothing more the checking of a box.

               But even if the council failed to detect his proclivity in the first instance, its structural protections against child molestation should have prevented his alleged crimes in the second instance.

               How so?

               The Boy Scouts of America supposedly has extensive child-protection training throughout its program. There is an insert in the front of all the Scout handbooks which tells scouts and parents how to avoid and be on the lookout for sexual predators. All Scout employees and volunteers take mandatory training in child protection.

               And rules are supposedly in place to make sure nothing can go wrong. The most important of those is that no adult is to be alone with a child ever. Ever.

               But apparently that rule was ignored for three years in a row at Massawepie.

               And so lax was management oversight that the chronic violation was not discovered.

               And so lax was management oversight that apparently multiple little boys were allegedly sexually misused by a man who never should have been within a hundred miles of a Boy Scout camp.

               And that’s not the fault of the police 19 years ago, that’s the fault of the Seneca Waterways Council this year.

               And that fault needs to be answered for.


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