Thursday, November 10, 2011

More thoughts on Penn State scandal

There is another facet of the Penn State story that I find fascinating: The degree to which a university is identified with a successful sports program. Some schools, like Stanford, have sports programs that even if successful are viewed as ancillary to the school’s academic reputation, while a school like Wisconsin is noted for both its academic and sports credentials. But when one thinks of Duke University, the first thing that pops into a non-alum’s head is the basketball program. Mention Ohio State, you think of the football program. The image of Penn State is inextricably tied to its football program; if someone says “I am an alum of Penn State,” they know that another person will be impressed not because of Penn State’s academics, but because it has a great football program. In the wake of the pedophile scandal (in which I again assert that heads should also roll in the law enforcement and judicial process that decided not to charge Sandusky with a crime in 1998, or investigate the “Second Mile” organization), there are those who are calling for a self-imposed “death penalty” in order to “clean house,” which would merely punish the innocent and set the football program back for decades, as happened to SMU. I say punishment the guilty and leave the rest with at least a smidgeon of dignity to their lives; the vast majority went to Penn State to receive an education, not to have the albatross of the football program hanging on their necks.

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It is sometimes hard to assess if Mike McCreary--witness to one of the assaults by Jerry Sandusky--is more reviled for not doing enough or doing too much, and it is a measure of the hypocrisy I sense in some quarters concerning the Penn State scandal. If the powers-that-be at Penn State thought merely firing a coach and a few administrators would satiate the blood lust of the media for high profile targets, that fantasy was quickly dashed by potentially far more explosive allegations—that the Sandusky’s “Second Mile” youth program was little more than an involuntary, underage gigolo warehouse servicing a clientele with the kind of deviant carnal tastes that one might prefer remain hidden in dark spaces and hidden rooms. But it isn’t just the media that is taking “advantage” of the situation. I was listening to a local sports station that was supposedly contacted by the county sexual assault resource center, which, as one might suspect, is focused on female victims; it was noted that it was short of funding and needed "help." My first reaction was that it was exploiting these boys who were victims of Sandusky, and likely many others, for money.

The reason for my cynicism is that the media—both commercial and news—and activist organizations paint the picture of the perpetual female victim, citing selective “statistics” that deliberately obscure the rate of the victimization of boys. The Seattle Weekly, which occasionally goes against the grain, did so in a recent story entitled “Lost Boys,” which examined a study conducted in New York City that blew apart the activist, law enforcement and media-driven propaganda of millions of female child sex-slaves controlled by evil pimps in the country. Not only was there a “disappointingly” low number of child prostitutes, nearly half of the underage prostitutes were male, and only ten percent of all claimed to be working for a pimp. The Weekly story noted that this study has been greeted with a wave of disbelief, outrage and denial by the established female-centered victim crusaders. It only seems that when there is a bigger, “patriarchal” target to stain, like the Catholic Church or a big-time football program, that there is sudden concern about male victims of sexual abuse; note that when adult women sexually molest boys, the general idea amongst the public is that the victims are “lucky,” and the victimizers “punished” in accordance with that attitude. Where were the sexual assault activists when these boys needed them—too busy fundraising to pay for their own female-centered agendas? One may recall a local case, the O.K. Boys Ranch, where allegations of sexual and physical abuse were ignored for a decade by DSHS and CPA officials who were supposed to oversee the operation.

As an aside, I’ve often heard media reports about rape as a weapon of war in places like the Congo; what these media reports do not tell you, as reported last July in the UK newspaper The Guardian, is that as many as half of these rape victims are males, silent victims because of the deliberate humiliation and emasculation.

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