In the mid 2000s I was in high school, and my bunk were the oldest girls. Because of our age group, we were friends with all of the counselors-in-training (CITs, for those not familiar with summer camp jargon), because they were only a year older than us, and a lot of the counselors were our friends, too. We had all grown up together.

One of the male CITs, we'll call him "Oswald" (because I don't know anybody fucking named Oswald and I don't want anyone to associate their own name with this story) had been spending summers at camp for years and years, just like my friends and I had. He was a goofy kid. He had friends but definitely wasn't conventionally attractive and he was more than a little awkward. The camp trusted him, however, and everybody knew him. He played guitar, and helped out with music stuff, and because of that had a little more responsibility and clout than the other bro-y CITs. So the counselors and other CITs never found it odd that Oswald frequently volunteered to take over night shifts. At least one counselor had to be "on duty" supervising the campers every night. The other counselor(s) would get the night off and they would cycle that way, with CITs not being required to sit OD because they still technically paid to be there. There had to be one staff member each night per cabin, but in the case of cabins adjoined by a bathroom, which was the case with most of them, one staff member would usually suffice for both.

About halfway through the second half of the summer, one brave kid, I think he was middle school aged, went up to the camp owners and directors (a family who had owned the camp since it opened almost 40 years ago) and spoke up about what was going on. It turns out Oswald was so keen on supervising because we was molesting a lot of the younger boys. I don't know a lot of the details, but I know that there was a lot of nudity and tickling involved, and since many of these kids were too young to know better, and Oswald was someone we all trusted, they did what he told them to.

When the one kid spoke up, shit hit the fan. It rattled the entire community. The director's young son had been one of the victims. The rest of the summer she was almost never seen without huge sunglasses on, as she'd spend all day crying and was trying to hide it from the campers. Her son ended up becoming and incredibly violent kid. I've heard that at home he's okay, but every summer at camp since then he's gotten into crazy trouble, even brutally beating up another kid at the slightest provocation. Another one of the kids was the assistant director's son. The family wasn't related to the owners, but they were wonderful people who had three kids at camp that summer, and everyone loved them. Their son who got molested was to scared to ever return to camp.

Obviously, Oswald was asked to leave and never to come back. It still resonates with all of us though, because his sister, a really nice girl, also had to leave, and their cousins are still at camp every summer. Obviously the psychological effects on the victims are tremendous, but those of us who were not directly victims were also hugely affected. This was someone my age whom I had known for so many years. We all thought he was completely harmless. EVERYONE trusted him, adults, counselors, and campers alike. He was our friend and it was such a shock to us that he had committed this atrocity. Everyone felt betrayed and confused. I thank the FSM every day that my younger brother, a camper at the time was touched by his noodley appendage and saved from being touched by Oswald.

The kid who spoke up was everyone's hero. Then he sued the camp. We couldn't believe how the situation was playing out.

I'm nearly done with college now, and recently, out of curiosity, I looked up Oswald on Facebook. I don't know what happened to him when he left camp. None of us (save for his cousins) ever saw or heard from him again, so I don't know if he underwent some sort of counseling or what kind of charges were pressed, if any. I did find his Facebook, however, and he seems to have a great life. He's smiling in all his pictures and surrounded by friends. He just graduated from a great college. I hate that he gets to be this happy. I know he was just 16 and that maybe he's been "cured" or whatever since then, and maybe he still struggles with what he did every day. But I've seen first hand how his victims and their families have had to deal with it, and it hurts me. Those are my friends and he was my friend and that's hard to deal with. I also noticed we have a mutual friend from outside of camp-- a friend that I met recently and see often-- and I wonder if she knows, or how she'd react, or how to keep this information to myself. I don't know the nature of their friendship, but it still bothers me.

I know this isn't nearly as bad as the first-hand posts about people committing sex crimes, or being victims of sex crimes, but it's also hard to be a witness. Our whole world came crashing down. I later became a counselor, and I noticed how serious they became about certain rules and policies at orientation. We all know now that anyone can be a predator, and kids need to know how to respond.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2007724&forum_id=2#21201918)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2007724&forum_id=2#21202849)