Please, No Excuses or Misplaced Empathy for Jerry Sandusky’s Enablers
Well, it’s already started. With the nation still reeling in shock over the child-rape scandal at Penn State, the excuses and misplaced empathy for Jerry Sandusky’s enablers have quickly usurped the public anguish, which should rightly be reserved for the child victims.
Victims? What victims? The nation’s eyes have become fixed on the ignoble fall of a noble man, Coach Joe Paterno, in what many see as an unjust end to a luminous, generation-enriching career.
We really ought only to be thinking now of the real victims. There are eight young male victims listed in the 40-count indictment against Sandusky. Two of these are listed due to eyewitness testimony, though their identities are still unknown.
The truth is we may never know how many victims there actually are.
Some are grown men, who may never come forward even when and if Sandusky goes to trial. Deeply embedded shame and chronic depression keep many victims of childhood sexual abuse in lifelong shadows. Some of these victims will never reveal, even to their most trusted intimates, that they were ever sexually abused. Yes, the shameful scars go that deep.
One or more of these victims may already be dead by his own hand, in one desperate act to stop feeling the torment that just won’t go away. Suicide — rather than vigilante violence against the attacker — is the more common outlet for helpless rage among victims of childhood sexual abuse.
Other victims commit suicide slowly through alcohol or drug addiction in a lifelong quest to numb the psychic pain. Even understanding why the pain is so intense, when the wounds are so invisible to others, provides enough psychic confusion to drive even the strongest soul to pure madness.
Some victims deeply internalize their sexual abuse and grow up to become abusers themselves, repeating the act of first sexual stimulation on the unwilling victims of a new generation. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Jerry Sandusky reveals at trial that he himself was once an innocent victim, as he pleads for mercy from the court of his peers. It’s no excuse and should be given no mercy. The vast, vast majority of sexual-abuse survivors never commit the crime of agony that was committed against them.
No, nearly all victims of childhood sexual abuse grow up and do the most harm to themselves, in a never-ending quest to numb that soul-wrenching pain and confusion which was sown so carelessly into their young psyches as their physical boundaries were so heinously violated. Childhood sexual abuse is truly a gift that just keeps on giving and giving and giving. And costing and costing and costing.
These are the things we should be thinking of now. The wrecked lives of the innocent boys violated by Coach Jerry Sandusky.
Next: Well, this shifting of focus away from the victims and onto the enablers is how good people become enablers of crimes against humanity, isn’t it?
But little has been written about the victims. A few former victims of other men have been interviewed and snippets of their stories highlighted by the press. Most of the coverage has now shifted to those who enabled the crimes to continue, and empathy pours out for the ruined careers and the football program endangered.
Well, this shifting of focus away from the victims and onto the enablers is how good people become enablers of crimes against humanity, isn’t it?
We fail to get our priorities straight. We give the wrong things the most weight in our judgments of the moment. We blind ourselves to the real suffering of a real victim, while imagining all the horrible things that might happen to ourselves or our great organization or institution or family or community, if we do what we know is right and tell the truth, and follow through to make sure the crime is stopped in its tracks.
In reality, there were probably a great many good people who turned a blind eye to this monster in their midst and allowed his crimes to continue.
Sandusky’s wife was in the home where he allegedly committed some of his crimes. His wife was closest to Sandusky, knew him best of all, spent the most time with him. Criminal pedophiles may be very good at hiding in plain sight, but I would bet my last dollar that right this very minute, Mrs. Sandusky is painfully remembering things that gave her husband away while she turned a willfully blind eye.
Then, there was the twenty-eight year old former Penn State player, then graduate assistant, Michael McQueary. It was McQueary’s eyewitness account of an anal rape against a boy — as yet unidentified Victim 2 — in the showers which finally brought this investigation to indictment. This rape McQueary witnessed occurred in 2002, nine years ago. How many boys did Sandusky violate in the interim? Enablers do far more harm than they think.
I was once a little girl, being orally raped, and abandoned by an eyewitness. So, I know a bit about how that boy — Victim 2 — felt. I know a bit about the rapes that follow in the wake of an enabler’s inaction. I know how greatly a pedophile is empowered by a witness’ nodding retreat.
I know how deep the soul is wounded by this sort of sexual penetration. I know about depression and drugs and suicide attempts, too.
And I can’t help but have a few questions for Michael McQueary.
What if that boy had been your son? What if that boy had been the grandson of Coach Joe Paterno? Would you have still walked out of that shower room “distraught,” and done nothing more than call your Daddy? Would you, Mr. McQueary, have turned your big, strong, yellow back on that boy being raped by a coach, if he had been an “important” child to you?
What about you, Coach Paterno? What if that boy McQueary abandoned had been your grandson? Would you still have merely passed the buck and gone on about your business?
Personalizing crime has a way of clarifying the hazy zones of conscience, you see.
There is indeed a place for genuine empathy.
But we, as a society, don’t stand one chance in hell of preventing some of these crimes in the future if we can’t even put our empathy in the right place now.
So, please no excuses or misplaced empathy for Sandusky’s enablers. Save it for the victims, who rightly deserve it, and you just might be able to make the right decision if fate should ever put a crime like this at your own front door.
Update: See Also Bookworm’s Mike McQueary — Poster Child for Moral Relativism?
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Check out Kyle-Anne’s previous PJ Steel Magnolia articles:
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| The Five Most Infantile Beliefs on Display at the ‘Occupy’ Tantrums | Barry Honey, Let’s Do Talk About Jobs |
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| Why Herman Cain Electrifies the Grassroots: Five Voters Speak Out |
Hear, hear!
We as a society need to stop making excuses for the pedos and their enablers.
No bail and gen pop.
Society likes to cry fowl and fain outrage, but the truth be told, the elites will protect their monstrous souls at all costs.
The cost of being PC and greedy.
Ms Shiver, thank you for your strength.
It really says how rapidly the moral relativism idiocy has taken over the society that a 28 year old would see a crime like this taking place and not know what to do: walk up behind the rapist, and smash his head into a wall to stop the crime.
Amen, Ms. Shiver. I can’t quibble with a word you say and anyone who would should be ashamed of themselves. As for smashing his head against a wall, couldn’t McQueary, at least, have done something like yelled for him to stop? How could he simply leave the boy to his molester?
Ms Shiver,
Its a sad state of affairs when you have to write an article such as this that states the obvious.
I hope you know most of us stand with you in your views and I hope you can draw strength from that.
I agree: a society enables such perversions to the exact extent it reacts to them. Cruel and unusual punishments are doled out by perverts to innocent children and that same unusual cruelty is circumvented by the courts in the case of the criminal. The result is a systemic decriminalization in terms of proportion and criminals who weigh the risks of crime and punishment have little fear compared to 100 years ago when they might be lynched.
Are we really more civilized as a result or is a smug sense of constitutional order satisfied at the price of ruined young lives in unknown but substantial numbers?
How many more people are created by molestation whose lives end up in their own disarray? Is Sandusky a victim of a victim of a victim? In cases of molestation where there is no doubt of the crime, a harsh and swift message should be doled out instead of putting them in prison with others of their kind in a community like Richard Speck enjoyed and even bragged about on video tape, a man who was a hideous murderer of young women. He should have been sent to the the nether regions shortly after he was convicted.
You know that those eight boys are just the tiny tip of the iceberg. Pedophiles are predatory and prolific. They are ALWAYS on the hunt. That’s pretty much all they think about. Look at how Sandusky set up his own game preserve. He should be in prison now and forever no stopping at Go.
“Well, this shifting of focus away from the victims and onto the enablers is how good people become enablers of crimes against humanity, isn’t it?”
This is nonsense.
Sure, the victims must be (and are) the primary focus of our concerns, but we will not prevent a single potential future crime by averting our gaze from the men who failed in this case to rise to the occasion. And we will only embed this evil in our culture more deeply if we permit ourselves to pretend that we are not capable of the same failings and that Paterno’s fall is not a real loss, in fact, a tragedy in the true sense of the word. (That does not mean that Paterno’s fall takes precedence over the terrible harm that was visited upon the true victims, anymore than Macbeth’s role as tragic hero makes him more “deserving” than Duncan, his victim, of our concern.) Paterno failed in assessing and acting upon the information in his possession. Those of us with the capacity to consider Paterno’s failings will, ourselves, fail if we refrain from analyzing and expressing our sense of how a man like Paterno, a revered leader, and his colleagues could so miserably have failed to act in the face of profound evil. We, as a species, are far from solving that problem.
Good for you! Thank you for saying in such a public venue what I’ve been saying to those around me. Thank you for using your painful past to shake some sense into people.
Greetings:
At the risk of appearing contentious, or even worse, those little Ox-bow Incident hairs on the back of my neck still seem to be vibrating away. Right now, I’m kind of wondering how many of these Penn State analyses are a kind of whistling past the graveyard reaction. The longer and louder their condemnations, the more we hopefully protect ourselves from acting similarly in some future encounter.
During my all-expense-paid tour of sunny Southeast Asia, I was an infantry squad leader. One day as we took our lunch break, I put two of my rifleman out on an observation post lest our repast be disturbed. Shortly thereafter, one of them called on the radio to say he saw two miscreants approaching and asked what he should do. My flippant Bronx-style reply was, “Did you forget your weapon?” Now this young man, who had been through both Basic and Advanced Infantry training was not a bad soldier, but the circumstance he found himself in was a bit more than he could handle at that moment, for whatever reason.
Similarly, there was an incident in another one of our company’s platoons in which a pointman came face to face with a bad guy and both turned tail and beat feet. Again, a good soldier, well trained, met a circumstance that overloaded his circuits and produced a less that optimal result. These experiences have left me more so than usual to “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
I spent most of my worklife in the printing industry. One of the boons and banes of that industry is dealing with Graphic Designers. One of the interesting things I came across in doing so was the concept of positive and negative space, the former having something in it as opposed to the latter. Looking at the Penn State situation and all the now inherent hand-wring, I asked my self what’s not begin put under the analytic microscope. Several things stand out to me.
The first is the homosex. I’ve seen references to anal rape, oral rape, sexual predation, but nowhere at any time to homosex or any of its variants. To my mind, that seems peculiar. I mean its obviously homosex and, at least in my mind, that would be a more heinous act than heterosex in that the damage to the child’s sexuality might be even more complicated. Yet, this issue seems to have the benefit of Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
The second is the requisite references to the Catholic Church’s failures in similar situations. The Church has certainly earned its ignominy in this regard, but there is another organization, the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) that has the goal of not only promoting, perhaps perfecting, this behavior but also of legitimizing it. Yet, I have no mention of it in the couple of handfuls of articles that I have read. Should not the public be informed or warned about this collection of predators and what they are about? Does this incident not provide such an opportunity?
Next is the due process aspect. Not long ago, the members of the Duke University lacrosse team found themselves entrapped in a legal incident with racial and sexual implications. In my opinion, the university did not behave particularly well. The team coach was fired and the team disbanded for some reason that made sense to the educated and credentialed overseers of that university. Several dozen faculty members had no problem condemning the accused before the they had had the benefit of any due process. None of those administrators and educators suffered any penalty. Those leaders in the sexual/civil rights industry who made their own contributions to the controversy seem still to be leading their various organizations with any moral approbation being heaped upon them.
The administrators at Penn State who behaved illegally or immorally should be investigated and their shortcomings brought to light. But there should be some form of due process involved. I see many references on blogs about people “being thrown under the bus” and things being done “for the children”. Many of those references are of a mocking tone. In terms of the non-judicial sanctions so far imposed/inflicted by Penn State, there seems to me to be some similarity. So, now that the university is in the glare of the public spotlight, one should assume that their interests are truth, justice, and the American way? As opposed to “Someone get a rope!” or “Will no one relieve me of this man?”.
Lastly, is the question of why a university has its own police force and how does that work in our democracy? I realize that there must be many warm and fuzzies for the ruler of the Penn State fiefdom to have his own military wing, but is this force responsible to elected officials or to appointed ones. As the university seems to have been successful in keeping the assaults out of the public judicial system for quite a while, is that not an indicator that something is grievously wrong or at least worthy of examination?
There seems to be much wrong at Penn State. However, I think that we will all be better off if we put a governor or two on our self-righteousness and moral indignation. A calm, rational process of investigation and explanation is what is most likely to produce an positive outcome of a very negative situation. If you all remember, the Ox-bow Incident did not end well.
The Duke Lacrosse event was something people should have had in mind before they started burning witches at Penn State. It very well may end up that there’s some big, bad doings in the admin there. But I’m not seeing what the downside is of giving it a proper investigation to be sure all the facts are correct before the trustees started destroying lives and careers to protect their own backsides. For example, McQueary says he did, in fact, call the police after the attack. Thats 100% different than what was initially reported in the indictment.
Regarding PSU’s police force, to put things in scale, the campus has 45,000 students. Its a massive campus. The surrounding boroughs wouldnt have the police force (or budget) to handle that. And I think the campus may even be its own township. PSU police are, I believe, somehow connected to the state police. They arent a ‘penn state military force’. They are real, honest to goodness police.
No, in the email McQueary says he spoke to the police, not call, and he does not indicate when he did this. A slight, but telling parsing of words. All of the contingent law enforcement agencies, Campus, Township, and State, have since stated that McQeary did NOT call to report the rape. McQueary did meet with a representative of the Campus PD some days later, so technically he did “speak” to the police.
I smell an attorney. And with this and other similar crap in his email the redheaded daddy’s boy gives the defence an opening to call him on his Grand Jury testimony.
The first enabler mentioned is interesting….Mrs. Sandusky. She absolutely had to know…and likely firsthand, that she was married to a pedophile. I am sure she has known for decades of his dark side. Her reasons for living with it? Financial security…reputation….compartmentalization. Think about this…here is a woman who likely had intimate relations with her own husband while actively conscious of his sexual appetite for little boys….How sick is that picture? It is sick and it is evil.
Jerry Sandusky is the face of a “reprobate mind”….He has no conscience…absolutely none. True, his enablers emboldened him…But it seems as though they all turned a blind eye for the same reason…money/security/privilege. Life, other than that “one thing” was simply too good to jeopardize by turning the pedophile in…They simply weighed things on balance…and the cost of kids lives was still less valuable…because others were picking up that tab.
We don’t know what she knew.
A witness to a violent crime has a duty to report it immediately to the police,not his supervisor at work. Call 911. Anything else is a sin.
11B40 had some good observations.
I wonder if the Penn State Police were like the Fort Hood Military who were on duty unharmed?
The Penn State Police may have been “unharmed” because the football program and JoePa were sacrosanct.
“Stiff” penalties (jailtime) for more than Sandusky would send a message. Including JoePa.
President Clinton getting off with his multiple sexual predator crimes has not helped.
Having been through a “somewhat similar” event recently, I have to thank you for your God given insight, or perhaps you have been there. I don’t know. But you have wisdom. Thanks from a father.
Ahhhh … Making excuses for scumbags. ….. The boomers have raised it to an art form. Everybody gets a trophy … nobody keeps score …. “It’s not my fault Dude” … And you can’t figure out why stool like this happens. When I was a lot younger sex criminals went to the general population in the toughest prison in the state. Six weeks max. Very hard to get out and re-offend when you have been stabbed 40 or 50 times.
Ms. Shiver, thank you for sharing your tragedy, and your unique insights. May God bless you and your family.
As a father, your words ring mighty true and to the point. I cannot add any more.
Kyle-Anne, why is sexual abuse so scarring?
Why the resulting guilt and shame and anger and depression?
Is there something in our DNA which vests sexuality with such power for severe and adverse impact from encountering the arousal of someone whose sexual interest in us is bewilderingly unexpected?
Or, if our deeply negative reaction to being fondled or coaxed is not a true force of nature but a learned, socialized bias against sexual arousal in general being successfully triggered as the malicious programming of a puritan society?
If the latter, then don’t we worsen the risk of psychological harm by fretting melodramatically about victimhood, reinforcing needless taboos?
Assuming none of us lives a storybook life, what would you say is a proper introduction to sexual conduct?
Can it ever be by the selfish indulgence of a much older person when the notion of sex was not even on the radar screen of a young mind?
You just might be another poster child for moral relativism.
1. It’s scarring because it’s evil perpetrated upon a relatively powerless person.
2. Because it’s violence against a child. The guilt results from a child’s egocentrism (most adults grow out of this but OWS demonstrates it isn’t always true), whereby we think that it was our fault. I can tell you that after Msgr first fondled me (age 7), I knew it was terrible, but I also thought it was somehow my fault, that I was bad.
3. It is natural, because it is an evil act.
4. No, it’s a natural reaction. And…we’re on to you: Evil 101 is where evil attempts to convince people that evil doesn’t exist.
5. No, see #4.
6. The goal should be “after marriage to one person of the opposite sex”; all other introductions carry damage to both parties.
7. It can be, but that’s evil.
Thanks Jeanette, I will research your explanation of a child’s “egocentrism” as the source of resulting psychological harm.
Much of the rest of your comment seems founded upon religious assumptions that sex drive is inherently evil and exposure to sexual contact is somehow damaging unless it occurs within marriage and only between two persons of the opposite sex.
That narrow viewpoint is of little use to someone like myself who generally needs a more thoughtful justification than The Spirit World Told Me So. I am like the little child who persists in asking Why and refuses to accept Because as a sufficient answer.
Yes, historically there are emotional problems with premarital and extramarital sex (primarily from the women’s point of view).
You can be as deiophobic as you want but just because the Judeo-Christian God suggests certain behavior, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
It is heartbreaking to hear your story and to think of those children whose lives were ruined so that Penn State would not get any bad publicity. Sadly, the enablers remind me of the Germans during WWII pretending not to notice that all their Jewish neighbors were disappearing. It also reminds me of the enablers in our country, not the least of whom are the press, and those who praise lawlessness, envy, promote division.
One good thing the Catholic Church did after the shameful abuse of children was allowed to happen was to institute a program called Virtus Training, which any adult having any contact with children must complete before working with children. It opens your eyes to who these people are, how they work, and what to look for to protect children.
Sexual abuse of a child by an adult makes the child feel guilty and helpless. The adult uses manipulation and intimidation to coerce the child and often confuses the child about the feelings of betrayal and fear the child truly feels. Sometimes the child receives special privileges for being the abuser’s sex partner causing further guilt and confusion. I work professionally to help these kids. Please know that sexual abuse, particulary incest, is more prevalent than many of us know or accept.
I am sorry you were abused as a little girl. And I am glad that you have spoken up about the abuse of little boys as being equally bad as for little girls. However it does not seem that the general public sees it that way.
It may be because of the smokescreen that the homosexuals have developed to make all criticism of homosexual acts equivalent to an abuse of their civil rights. In fact I don’t believe the word homosexual appears in any of the articles about this tragedy, as if it occurred without a homosexual perpetrator.
Your suffering puts in perspective all that life has thrown my way. Thank you for all the courageous good you have, are and will do. And thank you for the example of your strength. God bless you in your work. Have a blessed Thanksgiving.
Shrivee, you’re absolutely right on every point. God bless you and I’m very thankful for brave and honest souls like you.
I gotta say I disagree with the general premise of this article, that we should concentrate our attention in this matter solely, or principally, on the children. They will (or at least should) get the attention they need, but much or all of it should be out of the public eye, with their families and counsellors, people like that. If charges are ever brought, I imagine some of them anyway will get their day in court, to tell their side of the story if they choose. The problem that I have with the article is pretty simple though: if Jerry Sandusky hadn’t been Joe Paterno’s assistant for so many years, this probably would never have been allowed to occur.
Think about it for a second. If a guy who ran a charity for “at-risk youth” were caught in the act of raping a young person, do you really think that someone else who worked for the school would just report him to the “authorities” and then put the whole thing aside, in his mind? The fact of the matter is that Penn State is more or less the enabler here. The individuals involved (Paterno, the university’s President, and others) are more or less individuals who didn’t have the nerve to buck the system when it’s clear they should have. I read somewhere a few days ago that Penn State’s football program brings $70 million to the school annually, and I think it’s pretty clear that no one wanted to upset that apple cart. They feared exposing Sandusky would jeopardize this, so they ignored what he did and hoped no one would notice. Seriously, where else in our society could a firing like that of Joe Paterno–after he was clearly shown to have been at least semi-complicit in a long string of child molestations–where else could a firing like that cause a *riot*?
Money corrupts, when there’s lots of it. People do lots of things they shouldn’t to keep the cash flowing. It’s been my contention for years that colleges shouldn’t *have* intermural sports; in other words, you go to college to get an education, and if you participate in athletics it’s for the purpose of getting in or keeping yourself in shape, and none other. You want to be a football player? There should be a minor-league football system, like baseball has. Basketball too. Education should be about…education, not football. I once met a young person who was astonished you could get a scholarship for *good grades*. He thought the word, by definition, meant that you were a good athlete.
I know there will be people here who in response to what I write will aver that things are “just as bad” or “almost as bad” as they ever were regarding child molestors and their victims. I frankly don’t believe it. We know considerably more now, between the molestors who have been caught and studied, and those allegations which have turned out to be more or less bogus (McMartin Pre-School most notably) and these days everyone is much more vigilant. Nowadays, single males who don’t have children are basically kept away from them, unless you have neices and nephews or something. People just don’t trust men anymore, because a few probably are predators. Regardless, I insist that this whole thing wouldn’t have happened if the school didn’t make as much money off of football as it does, and if Paterno wasn’t the famous and revered coach he was. Yes, it’s annoying that the celebrities in this case get attention; however, the attention that I believe they should get isn’t positive, and the intent is to make certain that if college football continues (as it most certainly will, my opinion above being very largely in the minority) the next coach to come along will make absolutely certain that something like this doesn’t happen on his watch. The French have a saying for this sort of situation: “Pour encourager les autres.” (My French is non-existent, so please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors.) It was used to justify the execution of deserters during World War I. It means, roughly translated, “Make him an example for the others”.