Girl Scout cookie sellers as young as 5 are being harassed for selling unhealthy food and a conspiracy theory about cookie money funding abortion

• Parents and Scout leaders say Girl Scouts are increasingly being harassed while selling cookies.
• Girls as young as 5 have been lectured for selling unhealthy food, or over the cookies' high prices.

Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, and young saleswomen in uniform are everywhere: holding court in office boardrooms for an afternoon, manning booths outside the local grocery store, or posting cheery video messages on social media, offering door-to-door shipping. You may even have a Girl Scout under your own roof, filling your garage with cases of the chocolatey, caramelly, peanut-buttery goods.

But Girl Scouts, and the women who lead their troops and volunteer with them during cookie season, say that the organization's tradition of face-to-face sales is increasingly accompanied by customer harassment.

From 5-year-old Daisies to 16-year-old Senior Scouts, girls are often forced to bear the brunt of angry tirades from adults who want to lecture them about healthy eating, moan about price hikes, or rant about the group's rumored (and false) link to Planned Parenthood.

A recent post about cookie-seller harassment in a popular Facebook parenting group netted more than 100 replies, with dozens of stories from troop leaders and other adult volunteers about what their Scouts endured.

"I feel like in the last 10 years, and maybe especially since the pandemic, that people are getting even more aggressive with girls and the volunteers," Oona Hanson, a Scouting parent in Los Angeles, said.

Comments about weight and diets 'can really destroy their self-esteem'

In interviews with Scouts, Scout leaders, and parents, no form of cookie-related harassment appears to be more pervasive than that related to the healthfulness — or lack thereof — of the product.

Hanson, who works as a parent coach and family mentor at an eating-disorder-treatment center, has volunteered with her daughter's troop at local cookie booths. She said she's seen passersby make comments about weight gain, tell girls they can't trust themselves to have Thin Mints in the house, or even yell at girls for "poisoning" people.

"When you're standing at a cookie booth for an hour- or two-hour shift, or you're delivering cookies to someone's house, the accumulation of seemingly harmless jokes really adds up," Hanson said. "The most aggressive comments were about sugar, and really frightening the girls about things like diabetes or other health conditions."

On Feb. 3, Hanson tweeted a reminder to cookie shoppers not to make weight-related comments to Scouts. The tweet received hundreds of replies, many from adult women who said similar comments had spurred unhealthy eating behaviors in them as children.

"My chronically dieting mother allowed me one half of a Girl Scout cookie per week when I was a child," wrote one. "Thanks for the reminder, says this woman who started receiving toxic messages about her body as a skinny but not petite teen," said another.

"Our culture has put so much energy around sweets and desserts," Hanson said. "Especially in America, I think there's this idea that we associate sin or indulgence with desserts. That's not necessarily true in a lot of other cultures. It speaks to how powerful an offhand comment can be that someone decades later on Twitter would respond and share their story."

Morgan Shelly, who lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, has also witnessed diet-related harassment firsthand. In 2016, she was running a supermarket cookie booth with her troop of 9- and-10-year-old Scouts when one woman "looked at the girls and just responded, 'Cookies make you fat.' And walked away."

Shelly was stunned. "The girls were at the age where something like this can really destroy your self-esteem," she said in a Facebook message.

After the incident, Shelly and her fellow troop leader reassured the girls that "some people have wrong ideas about all sorts of things, and think it is OK to voice those things," she said. "But that was really the start of us as troop leaders really needing to do an ongoing check-in with the girls."

"For an elementary-school-aged child to hear that this product that they're selling and enjoying could make someone sick is really dangerous," Hanson, who regularly works with families whose children have eating disorders, said. "Especially when we know that these girls selling cookies are hundreds of times more likely to develop an eating disorder than to develop diabetes."

Scouts are berated for things they can't control, from ingredients to pricing

The Girl Scouts of America first sold cookies to fund troop activities as early as 1917, according to the Cookie History page on the organization's website. Sales went national during the 1920s, and the 1930s brought the first commercially baked cookies. By the 1990s, there were eight varieties available, made by two commercial bakeries.

About 200 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies are now sold each year. The current price of a box is $5, and according to GSUSA, all profits benefit local Girl Scout councils, funding activities like outdoor programs, STEM experiences, and travel.

Compared to other commercial cookie brands, Girl Scout cookies can be pricey: a nine-ounce box of Thin Mints costs 55 cents an ounce, compared to roughly 25 cents an ounce for a standard pack of Oreos. That often creates sticker shock among potential buyers, according to adults who have worked cookie booths.

Every year "we have some people say that the cookies are too expensive and they can just buy them at Aldi," Christine McNelis, a Girl Scout parent from Noblesville, Indiana, said. (The grocery chain sells its own line of knockoff Girl Scout cookies.)

Troop leaders say cookie prices are controlled by the individual councils, and are out of their and the girls' hands. "Today's prices reflect both the current cost of cookies and the realities of providing Girl Scout programming in an ever-changing economic environment," the GSUSA website says.

Other parents say their girls have been harassed for a different issue beyond their control: the use of palm oil in the cookies. Widely used in commercial baked goods, the oil is controversial because its production can lead to deforestation and disrupt the habitat of endangered species.

"It is necessary to use palm oil in our cookies because of its unique ability to provide volume and texture in baked goods, usually without adding trans fats," GSUSA says on its website. "Although we continue to explore alternatives, currently, there are no viable or readily available alternatives for use in the production of Girl Scout Cookies."

Hanson said she's witnessed palm-oil-related harassment firsthand, and it's frustrating. "If people have a beef with the industrial food complex, why are 5-year-old girls where you're putting that anger?"

Conspiracy theories about a link to Planned Parenthood

In 2004, the leader of an anti-abortion group in Waco, Texas, took out ads on Christian radio to protest a "cozy relationship" between the Girl Scouts and Planned Parenthood. The cause for consternation: The Bluebonnet Council, a group that included Waco-area Girl Scout troops, had put its name and logo on brochures distributed at a Planned Parenthood sex-education program for tweens and young teenagers.

According to an NBC News report, the Bluebonnet Council did not send Girl Scout troops or provide funding to the sex-ed program, and it ended its affiliation with it that year. But the conspiracy theory that Girl Scout cookie profits fund Planned Parenthood has stuck, particularly among those who strongly oppose abortion. Facebook posts that allege a link between GSUSA and Planned Parenthood get thousands of shares, with commenters promising they'll boycott the cookie drive.

"Girl Scouts of the USA does not have a relationship or partnership with Planned Parenthood," the organization says on its website. A federal 990 tax form, also available on the website, shows that no funds from the national organization went to Planned Parenthood.

That hasn't stopped anti-abortion advocates from harassing their daughters, parents say.

In 2019, Indu Rajan, who leads her daughter's troop in Dublin, Ohio, was working at a cookie booth in front of a local Walgreens when a woman approached to say she wouldn't support the Scouts until they dropped their support of Planned Parenthood.

The girls, then 10 years old, "had no idea what she was talking about, and the adults were too shocked to respond," Rajan said in a Twitter DM. "I was angry, but I kept my cool." She said she did not receive any guidance or assistance from her council leadership about the incident.

Melissa Atkins Wardy said her daughter Amelia, then 7, was harassed while the pair sold cookies door-to-door in their former neighborhood in Wisconsin.

"The lady took the cookie form and shoved it back into my daughter's chest, and said, 'I don't support programs that support abortion,'" Wardy said. "And I was like, 'Are you freaking kidding me? My kid is 7. She has no idea what you're talking about.' And so we left."

Wardy was shaken. "It kind of went over Amelia's head, but I'm like, 'I don't want to explain to my 7-year-old what an abortion is. It doesn't matter what my feelings are on the subject.'"

'They get harassed because they're girls'

Now a high-school sophomore, Amelia is still a Scout, and this will be the 11th season of cookie sales for her and her mother. But these days, Amelia is wary of selling cookies in person, Wardy said.

Her daughter endured two incidents of sexual harassment this year, Wardy said. She was catcalled while out with her grandmother, and she and her friends were harassed by a man as they sold programs at a sporting event. This year, Amelia decided to only sell cookies at her private Catholic girls' school.

"Girls naturally deselect from doing booths and sell in spaces where they feel safe," Wardy, who works in child advocacy in El Paso, said.

"It's hard when you're a parent to transition your tween, teen daughter from being this force of nature who's going to take over the world to understanding that you're going to do that while you're also being sexualized, harassed, and belittled, and called a bitch."

Harassment of Girl Scouts is inextricable from the larger issue of sexism in American culture, parents and troop leaders say.

"I think they get harassed because they're girls," said Liz Franke, a third-generation Girl Scout in Princeton, N.J., who serves as her daughter's troop leader. And because most troop leaders are women, people "think that perhaps, you know, a female leader is also not going to give them what for."

In Franke's experience, they're mistaken. "If they're approaching it from that place, they haven't met the leaders that I work with, because they will defend their girls, claws out, if they have to," she said. "I will get arrested for my girls, if that's the difference between subjecting them to a disgusting rant and telling someone off."

'We prepare our girls for difficult customers or difficult situations'

Girl Scout councils take the safety of cookie sellers seriously, said Kimberly Bryson, the chief operating officer of the Girl Scouts of Central and Southern New Jersey, which serves about 19,000 girls in the state.

In Bryson's council, two adults are required to volunteer for each shift at a cookie booth, and girls can have them take over a conversation if they feel uncomfortable. For Scouts, there's a program called Cookie University, which prepares girls with talking points for encounters with angry customers.

"Mostly what we prepare our girls for is difficult customers or difficult situations," Bryson said. Girls are encouraged to respond with positive messages about "why they are selling, what their goals are, how the program helps them set budgets and spend money and how it impacts what they are able to do in the future."

"You don't know what's going on in that person's life, and we teach our girls just to be gracious," said Becky Burton, the chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of Texas Oklahoma Plains in Fort Worth, Texas. "If there is a situation and it escalates, that's why we never have girls at a booth by themselves, never. An adult can take that adult away and have a conversation out of the girls' earshot."

Adult volunteers can also escalate a harassment complaint to the council. "When it reaches my desk, you know it's bad," Burton said. "But haters are going to hate. They don't have to love Girl Scout cookies."

Still, turning the other cheek might be easier said than done, especially in current times. Hanson thinks the pressures of the pandemic may have resulted in more angry, frustrated people willing to take out their stresses on someone.

She urges people to pause and think about how their words will be heard by a child — and to remember that children, too, feel a great deal of anxiety over the pandemic and the state of the world, even at a young age.

"Why does it seem easier to go after little girls for things that are upsetting people about the world?" she asked.