Boy Scouts of America sex abuse cases

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with 2.3 million youth members and approximately 889,000 adult volunteers in 2017. In 1979 there were over 5 million youths in BSA.

The high risk of sex abuse in volunteer youth organizations has been recognized, and, in 1988, the BSA created a sex abuse education and prevention program called the Youth Protection program to help address the problem. There were around 2,000 reported cases of abuse within the Boy Scouts of America prior to 1994.

In 2010, a jury ordered that the Boy Scouts of America pay US$18.5 million (equivalent to $25.8 million in 2023) to a scout who was abused in the 1980s – the largest punitive damages award to a single plaintiff in a child abuse case in the US.

On February 18, 2020, the Boy Scouts of America filed for a Chapter 11 financial restructuring to offer "equitable compensation" to survivors and their families. The BSA cited approximately 200 pending lawsuits in state and federal district courts across the United States and 1,700 potential claimants in total. In May of that same year, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware set November 16, 2020, at 5pm EST as the bar date for all survivors of sexual abuse; 92,700 sexual abuse claims were filed with the bankruptcy court by the deadline.

In December 2021, the insurer for the BSA agreed to pay $800 million into a fund for survivors, and in September 2022 – as part of their bankruptcy settlement – the BSA agreed to pay over $2.4 billion into the fund, with payments beginning in September 2023.