Girl Scouts are in a “highly damaging” recruitment war with Boy Scouts after they opened their main services to girls, causing confusion in the market and some girls inadvertently joining Boy Scouts, say lawyers for the centenary Girl Scout organization in court papers.
The competition, more conjecture than reality two years ago, intensified as the Boy Scouts of America organization – which insists that recruits commit to being “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous and kind” – recruited girls unfairly recently, according to allegations in legal documents filed on behalf of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
The lawyers filed papers in the Manhattan federal court on Thursday to repel a Scout effort to kick off a trademark infringement lawsuit that the Scouts filed in 2018 before the trial.
Last month, Scout attorneys asked a judge to reject claims that Scouts cannot use “Scouts” and “Scouting” in their recruitment of girls without infringing trademarks. They called the action “totally without merit”.
The Boy Scouts on Saturday pointed to legal arguments in which they blame the Girl Scouts for reacting to their expansion plans with “anger and alarm” and said the Girl Scouts launched a “land war” to spoil the Boy Scouts’ plans to include more girls.
In a statement, the Boy Scouts said they had expanded program offerings for girls “after years of requests from families” who wanted their boys and girls to participate in their character and leadership programs or for other reasons, including the desire to become one. scout.
“We applaud all organizations that develop character and leadership in children, including the Girl Scouts of the USA, and we believe that all families and communities benefit from the opportunity to select the programs that best suit their needs,” said the statement.
In their process, Girl Scouts said that Scout marketing for expanded girl services was “extraordinary and highly damaging for Girl Scouts” and had triggered an “explosion of confusion”.
“As a result of the Boy Scout offense, parents mistakenly enrolled their daughters in the Boy Scouts thinking they were Girl Scouts,” said the lawyers, adding that this never happened before 2018.
The Girl Scouts said they can prove that there are “rampant cases of confusion and mistaken cases of association between Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts” after the Boy Scouts directed the girls and their parents to marketing and recruiting communications in a way never seen before.
In their statement, however, the Boy Scouts said: “To imply that confusion is a prevalent reason for your choice is not only inaccurate – with no legally permissible example of it offered so far – but it also rejects the decisions of more than 120,000 girls and young women who have joined the Boy Scouts or BSA Boy Scouts since the programs became available to them. ”
The organization cited evidence of a small subset of documents delivered by 19 of the 250 local Boy Scout Councils, including evidence that registration fees were sometimes returned to parents who mistakenly thought they registered girls for Girl Scouts.
According to the report, the repeated cases of confusion and local interference by the Boy Scouts was a small fraction of what was happening across the country. Scouts and Scouts, as well as other large youth organizations, have seen declines in membership in recent years, as competition grew before the pandemic of sports leagues and busy family agendas.
In the spring of 2018, the Boy Scout program for 11-17 year olds announced that it would change its name to BSA Boy Scouts in early 2019. The main organization, the Boy Scouts of America and Boy Scouts, a program that caters to children from childhood through fifth grade, they kept their names.
The organization began admitting girls to Boy Scouts in August 2018, and BSA Boy Scouts began accepting girls in February 2019, lawyers said.