While you may be aware that the Boy Scouts have a sexual abuse problem, the Netflix documentary “Scout’s Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America” reveals the terrible, hypocritical extent of it.

The film points out that to protect its more than century-old reputation as a molder of virtuous young males, the organization kept massive internal records of molestations by adult volunteers exclusively to itself. Information was not shared with parents, authorities or anyone outside the lucrative operation until recently. In 2020, soon after the so-called Red Flag List, also known as “perversion files,” was finally made public, the Boy Scouts of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. That was mainly to manage over 82,000 abuse claims, the largest number against any U.S. organization, including the Catholic Church.

This is hardly some dry, legal exposé, though. Brian Knappenberger, who’s directed such Netflix docuseries as “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez,” addresses the subject with fact-based outrage, sometimes ironic detail, and devastating testimony from now middle-aged, still traumatized men. It’s presented as tastefully as such sordid subject matter can be, without shying away from necessary graphic descriptions of assault and manipulation.

Three key talking heads add context to Knappenberger’s thoughtful selection of nostalgic archive footage and survivor interviews.

Michael Johnson comes off as the epitome of a happy warrior, his jovial demeanor camouflaging a relentless crusader. For years an investigator for the Plano Police Department’s sex abuse division in Texas, Johnson was hired to be the Boy Scouts’ Youth Protection Director in 2010. He didn’t know at the time that he was replacing a man who’d been caught in a child pornography sting, and soon discovered his new bosses expected him to be their marketing face for safety measures he wasn’t seeing practiced. Johnson sacrificed severance to turn whistleblower against the BSA, and he continues to expose its corruption in this film.

In separate interviews, BSA’s former general counsel Steve McGowan doesn’t deny there’s a molestation problem but mainly sticks to the client’s downplaying strategy: Whatever happened reflected society and, anyway, was just a minuscule percentage of scouts’ experiences. Johnson eviscerates such notions, pointing out how camping trips, jamborees, church affiliations and the like create “exceptional access opportunities for perps to children.” (While there are numerous shots outside BSA headquarters, the film has no commentary from current Boy Scout officials.)

The third informed source is reporter Patrick Boyle. He managed to get hold of and store a lot of the files, even as his resulting articles and book received intense pushback from communities that held the all-American youth group in high regard.

Those stories, as you’d expect, are appalling. When scoutmaster Thomas Hacker’s pants-down touching campouts forced his removal from a district, he’d get rehired by others. “They made it so easy,” Hacker ultimately told police. A cabal of men targeted poor, single-parent households in New Orleans, sometimes even convincing trusting mothers to drive their sons to French Quarter hotels where the boys were pimped out to sex tourists.

这些例子的一些危险接近reinforcing the current “grooming” panic fueled by right-wing propaganda. But Johnson, with his vast investigative experience, rebuts such notions, pointing out that most pedophiles are heterosexual men — something he couldn’t convince the BSA brass of for the longest time. When the ban was finally lifted on openly gay scoutmasters, the conservative Mormon church, a major scouting sponsor, left the organization, which gives some insight into how embedded, unexamined attitudes paved the way for so much suffering.

Whether bankruptcy settlements will lead to a safer scouting program remains a question. “Chapter 11 is not a place for child abuse,” one survivor notes of the process, which turns victims into creditors.

It’s a complicated situation despite how morally straightforward it appears. “Scout’s Honor” deserves some kind of merit badge for trying to untangle the knotty, awful mess.

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer.