Anyone in a position of authority within an organization who gets told that adults he oversees are even possibly involved in child abuse has to call the police immediately or be complicit in the child abuse. The fact that their authority and the adults in question are within the organization means they are involving the organization in their cover-up. Calling the police is NOT spreading unsubstantiated rumors; it's reporting possible abuse, which needs to investigated every time, no matter what. Failure to report suspected child abuse is why so many people are upset at the Boy Scouts and at the Catholic Church as organizations.

It's interesting that so many people on this thread are saying that this is a witch hunt or that they had great scouting experiences and never saw any abuse. I was a scout myself and had a generally good time until the new scoutmaster came along. He was an ex-marine drill sergeant and we did formation marching, marching, marching, and not much else. But why would love of an organization and positive experiences with it cause anyone to scoff at proven instances of Boy Scout authorities not reporting sexual abuse?

I don't think a sexual abuse scandal within the Boy Scouts is necessarily an indictment of the whole organization unless concealment of abuse was a policy of the organization at the highest levels. It is, however, a very real indictment of the individuals who cared so much about the image of the organization that they were willing to collude in child rape; any individual who didn't call the police should be investigated and probably prosecuted. Should the organization have been better at screening scoutmasters? 20/20 hindsight says yes, of course, but I haven't made up my mind about that, both because I don't know enough about the whole case to decide and because I know it was a different world back then. I don't think people were as aware as we are now of how many child rapists there really are in the world, or to what lengths these rapists are willing to go to gain access to children.

On the other hand, the people who were doing the cover-up must have been at least at the middle-management level and they were clearly not well-trained or well-supervised. It seems unlikely that an organization like the Boy Scouts hadn't had internal discussions on the issue of abuse of power by adult volunteers, sexual or otherwise, and what their field managers were supposed to do about it.

But really, the whole story is that anyone who knows about child rape and doesn't call the police needs to go to jail along with the rapist.