No adult I spent time alone with regarding Boy Scouts in the late 60's to early 70's ever approached me inappropriately.
Most boyscouts today would say the exact same thing about their scouting experience, it has never been a common occurance.
The fact is that during the past weird sex crimes were simply not reported, either to police or in the press. Today that are the *favorite* material of the media, and there is no longer any taboo regarding involvment of the authorites. I have yet to see any actual evidence to indicate that this problem has actually gotten worse in any way.
While I tend to agree that this problem has always been with us, I also think there's a strong correlation between rates of biologically unrelated people living in the household and sex abuse, and I think the rates of broken families has risen dramatically recently, at least in some sub-groups if not the whole population.
No offense to the step-dad's and moms on the boards. I'm sure you love your stepkids like they were your biological own, but your doing so is
despite nature rather than because of it (and in fact it takes a lot better a person to do so than it does to love your own biological flesh and blood).
While people are certainly more capable of overiding their own natural urges than lions, watch the discovery channel and see what a new daddy does when he takes over the pride..he kills the young males and copulates with the young females as soon as they're old enough - which the bio-dad
didn't do.
Most child abuse takes place in the home. Genuine incest and physical abuse against your kids is the ultimate taboo against the concience, incest with a step-child is another link down the chain. Sex with a girlfriend's daughter is another step away, sex with the neighborhood ho's daughter is another step away, and sex with the kids of the folks you buy crack from and occasionally crash on their couch is yet another step away.
A child sex crimes investigator said to me (and I'm sure he was overstating the case for emphasis, but there can be truth in hyperbole), "it's always the f***** boyfriend, the newspapers always say 'father', but it's always some guy the woman's sleeping with, not really the kid's dad".