Ever since their founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America have been a staple of our culture-right up there with baseball and apple pie. For over a century now, this organization has played a huge part in the lives and memories of many American boys. But recently, the reputation of the scouts has been brought into question as a result of an investigation conducted by the Los Angeles Times.

What reporters for the LA Times discovered in their investigation was the apparent cover-up of alleged child molesters who were employed by or volunteered with the scouts. According to research by the Times, a “review of 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 has found that scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign – and helped many cover their tracks.”

They also reported that the scouts often learned about alleged abuse from boys, parents, staff members, or anonymous tips. In 80 percent of those cases there is no record of a report to the police. There were also times where the scouts helped known offenders slip quietly away from the troop without reporting them-even providing them with job references. There is also record of them allowing previous offenders back into the scouts and hiding incidents of abuse from parents.

Many will have a hard time reconciling this new information with the boy scouts they are familiar with, the organization that played such an important role in their lives. UNCW student Wes Sautter, for example, became a cub scout when he was only eight years old and made the jump to the boy scouts when he was in the 5th grade. In 2007, when he was 16 years old, Sautter finally reached the rank of Eagle Scout.

Sautter recalls his years with the boy scouts fondly, remembering experiences like scuba diving and sailing in Key West.

“The boy scouts was always a positive, fulfilling experience for me,” said Sautter. “Even though it was mostly work and very little play, I enjoyed bettering myself as a scout and as a person.”

Sautter says he was “honestly appalled” when he heard the story of these alleged child molestation cover-ups.

“I feel like the scouts are supposed to stand for purity and higher learning and I feel like this news impacts it greatly,” said Sautter. “I also believe it affects the image of local troops by staining their reputation, even if they weren’t involved purely based on the ‘guilty by association’ factor.”

However, Sautter still believes in the organization as a whole and the positive effects that it had in his life.

“I still stand by my getting Eagle Scout and still, to this day, believe that it is my greatest achievement,” said Sautter. “I would definitely still recommend the boy scouts to any young boy because I believe in spite of all of this controversy that it is still the greatest organization to ever be established.”