Reading today’s blistering Freeh Report, which lays bare the shocking absence of concern for children being abused by Jerry Sandusky at Penn State since 1998, detailing how everyone from the president of the university on down to the janitors protected this serial predator, I’m reminded of the children’s game of telephone.
One kid whispers a phrase into another’s ear, the words are repeated one child to the next, until the kid at the end of the line blurts out something so different than the original it has an entirely new meaning.
Having represented many children (and adults) in sexual abuse litigation, I know that it’s important to choose the anatomically and legally correct words, and to insist that everyone else involved use them too. Because this isn’t child’s play. Molestation of kids destroys lives. In court and with my clients, I always use the words: oral rape, anal rape, vaginal rape, digital penetration, sodomy. I’ve seen jurors and even judges flinch at this, as though I’m being discourteous. But the Freeh Report is a lesson to all of us that not only “if you see something, say something” (as they say in the New York City subways), but if you see something, say something, using the plain words for it. Because using “nicer” language directly benefits the rapist. And as the story gets repeated, rape turns into sex turns into “a grey area” and poof! — vanishes altogether.
As the Freeh report details, graduate student Mike McQueary saw Jerry Sandusky anally rape a little boy in the shower at Penn State in 2001. The next day, McQueary told head coach Joe Paterno what he saw, but avoided the words “sodomy” or “anal intercourse.” Whether in shock, out of a misguided sense of etiquette in the presence of the elderly, famous coach, or in denial about what he’d seen with his own two eyes, McQueary failed to use the correct words, saying that he’d seen activity in the shower that was “way over the lines.” Paterno remembered McQueary telling him about “fondling” and that McQueary was uncomfortable giving details, so Paterno didn’t push for them. That obfuscation got repeated up the chain of command. “JoPa” then discussed it with college administrators (but not right away – he didn’t want to bother them on the weekend). By the time the top brass were discussing it, “two people in the shower” were doing “something inappropriate” and something they were “uncomfortable” with.
Whatever that means.
And no one called the police. Ten more years passed before Sandusky, a serial predator, was brought to justice. Only he knows how many more victims he raped after 2001, but the report lists several. My guess would be dozens more boys and hundreds or thousands more incidents.
Even the Freeh report often flinches at using the precise words. McQueary saw Sandusky “involved in sexual activity” with a boy in the shower, the report says. No. A couple of college students making out under the bleachers are “involved in sexual activity.” An adult man inserting his penis into a child is raping him.
The media too perpetuates the softening of this crime. A Google search of “Sandusky ‘sex scandal’” produces twenty times as many results as “Sandusky ‘anal rape’”. Eliot Spitzer taking up with hookers is a sex scandal – a phrase that describes consensual adult behavior. There’s no sex scandal here. Sandusky raped children, who were not legally or psychologically capable of consent, decimating their lives.
Those boys had to endure it. We dishonor them when we fail to speak the truth about what it was.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not necessarily those of Avvo.com.
