Michael Johnson first learned about the “ineligible volunteer files” on day one of his time with the Boy Scouts of America. Hired in 2010 as the organization’s first youth protection officer, Johnson, a longtime criminal investigator from Plano, Texas, who specialized in sex crimes, was tasked with recommending policies to keep its million members safe from sexual abuse by Scoutmasters, adult volunteers or fellow Scouts. The Boy Scouts, now known as Scouts BSA, had long failed to do this; the “ineligible volunteer files”, also known as the “perversion files” or “P-files”, were a private set of documents containing the names of known sexual abusers within the organization dating back to at least 1919 – evidence that the Boy Scouts, an institution associated with Rockwellian harmony and explicitly based in the ideals of leadership and courage, has long been aware of its unique vulnerabilities to sexual abuse.
Johnson attempted to address these vulnerabilities, namely the low barriers to entry for volunteering and the unsupervised overnight trips. But he kept running into barriers, either from higher-ups at the Boy Scouts of America, headquartered in Irving, Texas, or its religious partners, the Catholic church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, which severed ties with the Scouts in 2018 after it began admitting female, transgender and gay youths. Early in his tenure, Johnson asked for a standards of care document and was told there wasn’t one, even though the Scouts had officially advised on youth-serving organizations’ standard of care for the CDC.
