Thoughts on Being a Vulnerable Child and the Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal

I, like all other right-thinking people, am troubled by the unfolding events in the child sex abuse case against Jerry Sandusky, a former football coach at Penn State, and the ensuing cover up university employees and officials. I used to hate when women would say to me that because they were mothers certain issues around children were harder for them to process. I could not grasp that somehow the experience of gestation made them more sensitive to the horrors that can befall children in this world. I still don’t know how it happens. But now I am a mother. I am a mother and I know from my inside out that I am struck more deeply, am moved to tears more easily and judge those who do wrong to children more harshly.

I am also the mother of a boy. A beautiful boy. A boy who strangers love to fondle the thick black curls of his hair and give commentary about his physical appearance. Maybe mothers are more sensitive because every story of a hurt child—even those far away—is imagined with their child's visage superimposed on the unknown bodies of these other children. I think about all the men who did not come to the rescue of those boys. Manly men. Men who made their lives in the testosterone drenched world of football. Yet, they could not muster the testicular fortitude to stare down or knock down a predator—a predator wearing the face of a hero, a friend, but still a predator—and say this is someone’s child, a child of god and man, and you will not hurt them in my sight…or out.

Although, I am shocked by the depth of the cover-up at such a reputable institution. I am not shocked that no one stood up. In this country people regularly do not stand up in small and large ways for children. I think it also cannot be overemphasized that many of the children in the indictments came to know Sandusky through a program for at-risk youth. Before they were decorated with Penn State memorabilia and stood next to Joe Pa on the sidelines only to later be raped by someone they looked up to, they were already vulnerable.

Much lip service is given in this country to the things that must be done for “the children.” Really that is coded language for certain children. Not the over 16 million children who live in poverty. Or the children who attend underperforming schools or underperform in the schools they attend. Or the children who are in the expansive foster care system or whose parents for all kinds of reasons are unable to provide them with safe living conditions. I have to ask if the response of the graduate student who witnessed Sandusky assaulting a child in a locker room shower would have been different if these children were not already vulnerable.

I know that the world does not stand up for you in quite the same way when you are poor or a poor student or are not from a good family. I know because I was a vulnerable child. I grew up poor. I grew up in a house completely comprised of women. I grew up poor in a single parent household in the inner city during the onslaught of the crack epidemic. Any one of the aspects of my childhood listed in the previous sentence could have affirmed to a child, particularly to one sensitive to the world around her, the vulnerability, the fragility of your place in the larger world. The world you lived in or one you may only have known through fictionalized families beamed in through the television. Because people judged my family because there were no men or there were a lot of kids or because we did not have the all the latest things or all of the above openly to my face, I learned early that the world will sometimes not stand up for you even when you are a child. It did not always stand up for me.

My mother did. She is a warrior. She attempted to fortify our home, our lives, our selves with her love and loving lessons of how to negotiate difficult circumstances. She did not live in the myth that certain subjects were not for children because she had grown up without a mother. A motherless child is vulnerable. She did what she could. She did great, but it did now stop the world from trying to trip us up or cause us harm with the communication of messages like my family without men was less than or that because we were a tribe of women we were penetrable or weak. I also wonder what would have happened if the victims had been girls.

Of the parade of horribles in that indictment in the Penn State case, nowhere does it list the aggravated harm done to these children because they were already in some way in need. Sandusky’s behavior was overlooked and tolerated because he was preying on children who already did not have a voice. I taught my students just this week that the law does not, in general, require one to act in protection of another from the harm of a third party. The law does not require one to be a hero. I say “in general” because we have begun to see this common law convention diminish as legislation pushes for greater requirements that adults who have knowledge or suspect the abuse of children to come forward. That is the legal question that is working itself out in the face of registered sex offender rules and Catholic Church scandals, which have expanded civil liability for those who don’t come forward when they know of abuse. However, it still largely holds that one has no responsibility to rescue anyone from the harm of another even if rescue requires little risk to you. Each fall, my Torts students and I grapple with the moral paradox of this legal rule. The law does not require you to be a hero, but maybe sometimes good sense and righteousness does.

There are many conversations that I hope come from this case after the pursuit of justice and financial compensation for these victims and the victims who are surely to come. I hope that universities will be able to arrest some of the power they have ceded to athletic coaches. I hope that we have more conversations about how typical the behavior of Sandusky is in sex abuse cases—known perpetrator who grooms children and crosses boundaries before initiating sexual contact.

Most importantly I hope we will have real talk about how we can provide a safer world for ALL children in this country. Until then, my thoughts are with the children victimized by Sandusky then a series of people at Penn State and other state officials…and their mothers.