Boy Scouts of America Sexual Abuse.

How 20,000 Boy Scouts Survivors Found Their Voice — and What It Taught Us About Reaching Trauma Survivors Through Advertising

I’ve run mass tort campaigns across virtually every category of litigation — pharmaceutical harms, environmental contamination, product liability, opioid addiction. Most of those campaigns involve claimants who have a relatively clear relationship with their injury: they used a product, they got sick, they want accountability.

The Boy Scouts of America sexual abuse bankruptcy campaign was different in every way that matters. The claimants were survivors of childhood sexual abuse, most of them men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who had carried that trauma in silence for decades. Many had never told anyone what happened to them — not their wives, not their children, not their closest friends. The advertising challenge wasn’t just reaching them. It was giving them a reason to trust that coming forward was safe.

What we built with attorney Anne Andrews and her team produced over 20,000 filed claims out of the 93,000 total filed in the BSA bankruptcy — one of the most successful survivor engagement efforts in mass tort history. Here’s how we did it, and what it means for firms considering institutional abuse litigation.

The Context: Why BSA Filed for Bankruptcy and What It Meant for Survivors

The Boy Scouts of America had faced sexual abuse allegations for decades, but the scale of the problem — and the organization’s systematic concealment of it — didn’t become fully public until litigation forced the release of internal “perversion files” documenting thousands of accused abusers going back to the 1940s. As the volume of lawsuits became unmanageable, BSA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2020.

Bankruptcy reorganization creates a specific dynamic for survivors: there is a claims deadline, after which no new claims can be filed against the bankruptcy estate. For tens of thousands of survivors who had never come forward, that deadline represented a closing window — potentially their last legal opportunity to seek any form of acknowledgment or compensation.

Anne Andrews, a pioneer in mass tort bankruptcy litigation who had successfully led the Purdue opioid bankruptcy claims campaign, recognized that standard advertising approaches would not work for this population. She brought in our team to develop something different.

Understanding the Audience: Men Who Had Never Spoken

The demographic profile of BSA sexual abuse survivors created unique advertising challenges. These were primarily men between 40 and 70 years old — a demographic that Facebook reaches well, but a demographic that has also been culturally conditioned to stay silent about sexual victimization. The stigma around male survivors of sexual abuse is real and significant. For many of the men we needed to reach, the idea of filing a legal claim meant publicly identifying as a victim of childhood sexual abuse — something they had avoided for their entire adult lives.

Our research into survivor behavior revealed a key insight: these men were not searching for legal help. They were not clicking on ads that led with lawsuit language. Many of them didn’t think of themselves as having a “claim” — they thought of themselves as having a secret. The advertising had to meet them in that reality.

The Strategy: Healing First, Legal Options Second

The campaign architecture we built centered on a simple principle: lead with healing and connection, not legal language or compensation.

The ads that performed best didn’t mention lawsuits in the headline. They didn’t reference settlement figures. They opened with recognition: “If you were abused as a Boy Scout, you are not alone. Many survivors are coming forward. There may be time to be heard.” The emotional register was calm, validating, and safe — the opposite of the aggressive legal advertising that most mass tort campaigns use.

We ran video creative featuring quiet, dignified imagery and voiceover language developed in consultation with trauma-informed communications specialists. We tested messaging across several dimensions:

• Purpose framing: “Help protect future scouts” outperformed “Get compensation for what happened to you” by a significant margin. Survivors were more motivated by the idea that their coming forward could prevent future harm than by the prospect of financial recovery.
• Community framing: “You are not alone. Thousands of men are coming forward.” Reducing the perceived isolation of the experience reduced the barrier to action.
• Safety framing: “You don’t have to relive everything. Just connecting to learn your options is enough.” Addressing the fear of the process directly improved response rates.

The Network That Scaled Intake

A single law firm cannot intake 20,000 survivor claims. The campaign’s success required building a referral network of more than 30 law firms across the country, each equipped to handle a portion of the claims with the sensitivity the cases demanded. Coordinating that network — ensuring consistent messaging, appropriate intake protocols, and a trauma-informed experience at every touchpoint — was as important as the advertising itself.

At MTAA, we managed the campaign as a coordinated system: advertising targeting that identified likely survivors based on age, geography, and engagement signals; landing page experiences designed to minimize friction and maximize a sense of safety; intake workflows that connected survivors to attorneys within hours of expressing interest; and a reporting infrastructure that allowed us to optimize for qualified claim submissions rather than raw lead volume.

What This Campaign Means for Institutional Abuse Litigation

The BSA campaign established a replicable model for reaching survivors of institutional sexual abuse through digital advertising. The same principles apply to emerging institutional abuse dockets: Catholic Church abuse cases, youth sports organization cases, youth detention center cases, school district cases.

The core lessons are transferable: lead with empathy before legal language, reduce perceived barriers to coming forward, frame participation in terms of community and purpose rather than individual compensation, and build intake infrastructure that treats survivors as people — not leads.

Jacob Malherbe’s reflection on the campaign captures it best: “The hardest part was knowing that for each claim, someone had to relive their childhood trauma. But the result was worth it. We gave thousands of men a voice and a path to healing. Years later, I brought my own son to the Boy Scouts — because I saw with my own eyes the changes the organization had made. Sometimes what we do is for future generations.”

If your firm is evaluating institutional abuse litigation and you want to understand how to build a survivor engagement campaign that actually reaches the people who most need representation, reach out. This is one of the most mission-aligned work we do, and we bring everything we learned from the BSA campaign to every institutional abuse case we run.