Opinion: The Aftermath of Child Abuse Cases

by Victoria A. Brownworth

he big trials are over now. Jerry Sandusky is in prison, likely for the rest of his life and Penn State has been handed a hefty penalty by the NCAA. The statue of legendary coach Joe Paterno has been removed and the ground where it stood planted with young trees.

Monsignor William Lynn has been sentenced to three to six years for his role in the priest sex abuse scandal that has rocked Philadelphia for what we now know to be decades. Lynn attempted to have his sentence vacated and reduced to probation or house arrest, but the judge was adamant, declaring that Lynn’s actions–and inactions–had condemned children to be "raped" and "have their souls stolen."

Lynn’s attorneys called the judge’s sentence an outrage, since Lynn himself had raped no one and another priest who had been scheduled to be tried with Lynn had pleaded guilty to one count of rape and had immediately gone off to serve only two years in a deal that meant he wouldn’t serve time for other victims who had come forward. Why, Lynn’s attorneys asked, should Lynn serve more time, completely missing the point that Lynn was in charge of these priests as well as the complaints of their victims.

More trials have yet to be held–other members of the Penn State faculty who have been charged with the cover-up of Sandusky’s serial rape of children at the college, and Lynn’s co-defendant, Rev. James Brennan, who had been charged with attempted rape, but about whom the jury could not agree on a verdict–these men all face trial before the year is out.

There’s been a surprising amount of outrage over the verdicts in these cases and the ensuing fallout at both Penn State and the Archdiocese. Perhaps not so much for Sandusky, but for Lynn, Brennan, the late Paterno and of course, the Penn State football team legacy.

I find it hard to fathom. How can anyone not get what happened in these cases? Children’s lives were destroyed. As the judge in the Lynn trial noted, innocence was obliterated. Lifelong trauma was visited on the victims and so many people at both the Archdiocese and Penn State could have stopped the violence and didn’t.

If you witnessed or heard of a child–a ten year old–being raped, what would you do? Better yet, since all the people involved in these cases are either priests or deeply religious, what do you think Jesus would do? My guess is Jesus would not have looked the other way or passed the buck to God the Father with the caveat that there was a process for dealing with problems.

Think that’s sacrilegious? I think it’s far more sacrilegious that men of God would rape children and other men of God would hide it from police.

Yet that’s what happened. If you were Monsignor Lynn or Joe Paterno (who was raised to the level of saint by Penn State), you apparently wouldn’t do the normal thing, the instinctive thing, and call the police to save the children. You’d look the other way. Lynn, Paterno, the other members of the Archdiocesan and Penn State hierarchies–their attitudes were anything but normal. It was: "Unpleasant, yes, but think of the scandal!"

When they thought about protecting something, it was themselves and the reputations of their institutions that were foremost in their minds. The screams of the children and teens being assaulted or the life-long trauma that would ensue for the victims when they were ignored, threatened or bought off–that was just annoying background noise to them. Lynn and Paterno actively protected the rapists, not their victims.

Figures of great respect in their communities, they chose to ignore and cover up crimes. No one can assert–not Lynn’s family nor Paterno’s–that these men didn’t know what they were doing. They did and they didn’t care. The innate societal dictate that we must protect the most vulnerable–children, the elderly, animals–from harm was utterly ignored. Paterno was fired, but died before he could be indicted or further implicated in the horrors he helped cover up. At 61, however, Lynn is merely on the far side of middle age. His sentence will help pay for his own crimes of cruel indifference and what I refer to as the Nazi defense: "I was just following orders."

It’s not, pardon the pun, Monday morning quarter-backing to see that Lynn and Paterno should have acted differently.

Rape is a crime. The rape of children by grown men is horrifying to imagine. Small, virginal children having the adult penises of grown men forced into their rectums and mouths and in the case of priests who had also sexually assaulted girls, their hymen-intact vaginas.

Makes you want to turn the page or throw up or both, doesn’t it?

And yet, Lynn and Paterno just shrugged it off. And one wonders if anything has changed in the aftermath of the trials. For there was the new president of Penn State–the former president having been fired for participating in the Sandusky cover-up–making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows on July 29 talking about how the punishment meted out by the NCAA could have been worse. As if that were the issue.

All these punishments could have been worse.

Is it fair that Penn State football players be tainted by the crimes of their coaches? No. But then that’s the argument Lynn’s attorneys were making as well: that Lynn wasn’t the perpetrator, he was just a bystander. He never raped a boy or girl. Perhaps not, but he knew dozens of priests had and he did nothing.

I do feel bad for the athletes at Penn State. They are tainted by this scandal, and it’s a shame for them, especially those stripped of their victories in the period of 13 years that their revered coach knew his assistant was raping boys in the same showers they used after a game but did nothing to stop it.

It is to be hoped that the current team as well as previous players all learn something from what has happened here. Let’s hope they don’t get caught up in "fair" or "unfair" and instead understand that when people in charge do the wrong thing, innocent people get hurt. There are a myriad of victims in both the priest scandal and the Penn State scandal. But the reason for that is that there exists in our society a culture of men protecting other men’s right to rape and until that changes, there will always be more victims.

We must not forget what these cases were about. They were about rape. They were about forced sexual assault on minors. Sandusky ran a charity program for underprivileged kids. The Philadelphia Archdiocese did much the same thing. Sandusky and various priests used their power over these vulnerable kids who needed them to sexually assault them–some once, some repeatedly. These kids were literally and metaphorically backed into a corner by men who had power over their lives. They had no choice but to submit.

Some of these men thought they were offering these kids love and attention. Certainly this was true of Sandusky who wrote his victims what could only be characterized as love letters. But these men were also manipulating their victims’ vulnerability until they got them into secluded places where they then raped and sodomized them.

So as we prepare for the next round of trials from Penn State and the Archdiocese, let’s remember what this is all about: a culture and acceptance of rape, a culture and acceptance of sexual violence.

These trials can’t stop that–there will probably always be rapists–but they can repeatedly state what should be obvious: taking what isn’t yours is a crime. These trials can–and should–teach the students at Penn State and the boys serving at Mass of a Sunday that they need not be victims and they must not become perpetrators.

These cases are justice served but they are also cautionary tales. Now if we can just heed the warning.

Follow me on Twitter @VABVOX and follow my political blog at www.victoriabrownworth.com.