Boy Scouts of America Abuse: Justin Medlin’s “The Boy Who Stayed There”

Content note: This poem discusses childhood sexual abuse, trauma, substance use, and incarceration. It includes strong language.

Justin Medlin reached out to AVA Law Group with a piece about the abuse he experienced as a child in the Boy Scouts and what he has carried into adulthood. When we asked whether he wanted to share it publicly, he told us that sharing his story was important to him.

In “The Boy Who Stayed There,” Justin writes about silence, trust, anger, and the child he spent years trying to leave behind. He also speaks about accountability, holding space for both the harm he experienced and the choices he made later in life.

The Boy Who Stayed There
By: Justin Medlin

T

There was a boy.

Not a metaphor.

Not a lesson.

A real fucking boy
with a child’s hands
and a child’s trust
and no understanding
of what a person whom they looked up too someone they idolized could take from him.

He wore the colors of belonging.
Not knowing what they would come to mean.

And somewhere between
the campfires and the sleeping bags
the codes and camaraderie —

someone taught him
that sometimes
the people you’re supposed to trust
are the ones you should fear.

He didn’t call it abuse.

He didn’t call it anything.

He was a child.

Children don’t have words
for the things that destroy them.

They have stomachaches.

They go quiet.

They stare at ceilings.

They learn how to leave their own bodies
without ever learning where they went.

⸻

H

He remembers pieces.

That’s all trauma gave him.

Washed out and Covered up with archery and merit badges are pieces.

Pieces.

A place.

A voice.

A smell.

The weight of fear
settling into his chest.

The strange confusion
of knowing something was wrong
without knowing why.

And then—

nothing.

Or maybe everything.

Because afterward
the world just kept moving.

People laughed.

People ate.

People slept.

Morning came.

Nobody announced
that something terrible
had happened.

So the boy learned
that terrible things
could happen quietly.

That you could be screaming
without making a sound.

⸻

E

Eventually
he got older.

But getting older
isn’t the same thing
as healing.

The body grows.

The bones get bigger.

The voice gets deeper.

People start calling you a man.

But somewhere underneath
all that muscle and anger,

there is still a child
sitting in the dark,

trying to understand
why somebody made him feel
like his own body
wasn’t his anymore.
That all of the traits and convictions that make a Man a MAN
Are being questioned. Who am I?

⸻

B

By then
he had learned other ways
to disappear.

Drugs

Alcohol

Rage.

Risk.

Anything loud enough
to drown out the quiet.

Anything that could make him
feel something other than
the thing underneath everything.

But I won’t romanticize it.

I won’t say the abuse
made me do it.

It didn’t.

I made choices.

Bad ones.

Ugly ones.

Choices that hurt people.

Choices that carried consequences.

I broke laws.

I broke trust.

I broke pieces of myself
that had nothing to do
with the person who hurt me.

Those things belong to me.

I own them.

⸻

O

But ownership
doesn’t mean pretending
there wasn’t a beginning.

There was.

There was a little boy
who learned fear
before he learned how to name it.

And maybe some of the man
I became
was built around protecting
that frightened kid. That kid still at that camp.

Maybe the anger
was armor.

Maybe the distance
was armor.

Maybe the addiction
was just another locked door.

But armor becomes heavy
when you wear it for decades.

Eventually
you forget what your skin feels like
without it.

⸻

Y

You want to know
what it did to the man?

It made trust complicated.

It made tenderness suspicious.

It made silence dangerous.

It made certain rooms
feel smaller than they were.

It made memories
show up without knocking.

It taught me to scan faces.

To read voices.

To notice hands.

To keep one part of myself
always ready to run.

And the worst part?

Sometimes I didn’t even know
I was doing it.

⸻

W

What happened to me
doesn’t absolve me.

I need that said plainly.

Because I refuse
to turn that little boy
into an excuse for the man.

He deserves better than that too.

He deserves to be believed
without being used
to explain away everything
I became.

So I carry both truths.

Someone hurt me.

And I hurt people.

One truth does not erase the other.

⸻

A

And somewhere in all of this
is a boy
I spent years trying not to remember.

Because remembering him
meant remembering what happened.

So I buried him.

Deep.

Under years.

Under substances.

Under anger.

Under prison walls.

Under every version of myself
that looked harder
than I actually felt.

I thought burying him
was how I survived.

Maybe it was.

But buried things
have a way of breathing.

⸻

S

So here he is.

Still.

Not healed.

Not ruined.

Just here.

The boy in the uniform.

The boy who didn’t understand
what had been taken from him.

The boy who kept quiet
because silence felt safer
than finding out
what would happen
if he spoke.

I wish I could go back.

Not to change everything.

Just to stand beside him.

Put my hand on his shoulder.

Look him in the eyes.

And tell him—

You didn’t do this.

You weren’t dirty.

You weren’t weak.

You weren’t asking for it.

And none of this belongs to you.

Then I’d sit beside him
in the darkness.

And for once,

I wouldn’t make him leave.

Because I’ve spent enough of my life
running from that boy.

Maybe becoming a man
was never about destroying him.

Maybe it was about
finally coming back for him.

I made the oath.
I kept the silence.

We are grateful to Justin for trusting us with his words. We share them with his permission, in his own voice.