The Sound of Silence
In college, I learned about a literary technique called “in medias res,” which is Latin for “in the middle of things.” It refers to the practice of starting a story in what would logically be the middle, when important events have already taken place and the central characters are enmeshed in a crisis. The most famous examples are the first two great works of Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The advantage of this method is that it engages the audience right away. If a movie starts in a boxing ring, with one of the fighters taking a terrible beating, we immediately sympathize with the guy and start pulling for him, even though we know nothing else about him.
The problem is that it is confusing. When our movie shows close-ups of people in the crowd watching the fight, we don’t know who they are or why we should care about them, and as the film rolls on we may have trouble keeping them straight. Is that tall guy the boxer’s brother, his manager or both? What about that girl who got up and walked out?
Sometimes an author may help us figure things out through the use of flashbacks, or he might just make us piece it together as we go along. One way or another we must put the puzzle together, because human beings are somehow hardwired to appreciate, even require, narrative. Once you get our attention, we need to know the whole story.
Such was the case with the Penn State scandal. Like Homer’s epic poems, the events in the saga had been going on for more than a decade before the curtain went up, but these events weren’t heroic. They were sick, cowardly and heartbreaking.
We came in on November 5 of this past year, when police in Pennsylvania arrested Jerry Sandusky, 67, the former defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team, and charged him with seven counts of child sexual abuse. The school’s athletic director and its vice president for finance were each charged with one count of perjury and failure to report a felony. The arrests came one day after a grand jury released the report of an investigation that had gone on for several years.
According to testimony before that grand jury, Sandusky had been molesting young boys at least since the mid 1990s, meeting them through a charity he founded and bringing them out to the Penn State campus. In 1998 the state police investigated a complaint filed by a woman who claimed that the coach had been inappropriate with her 11-year-old son. Sandusky apologized to the woman for “showering” with the child, and the case was closed.
That next year he resigned from the university, but kept his keys and his privileges, and continued to bring boys there. In 2000, a janitor in the football building reported to his supervisor that he had witnessed a sexual assault on a child, but nobody called law enforcement. Then in March of 2002, a coaching assistant and former player named Mike McQueary allegedly saw Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the shower room.
Accounts vary as to what happened next, but apparently McQueary went to head coach Joe Paterno the next day and told him what he saw. The day after that, Paterno related something to the athletic director, prompting an internal investigation but no sort of police report. The officials involved, A.D. Tim Curley and university Vice President Gary Shultz, claim that they did not find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, but revoked Sandusky’s campus privileges.
For the next six years, he continued his activities with his charity, and also volunteered to coach at the local high school. Finally, in 2008, a woman called the high school to report that her son had been sexually abused. The principal ejected Sandusky from the school and called the police, which eventually resulted in the grand jury investigation. Eight victims were identified during that process, and approximately a half-dozen more have contacted authorities since.
We have a presumption of innocence in this country, and I’m not saying that Sandusky did the things he is accused of, but he has already admitted to showering with young boys, touching them inappropriately and “horsing around” in the shower. Even if that were all he ever did it would be way over the line. If he’s guilty of the rest, then he’s a monster who deserves all the condemnation that’s been raining down upon him.
You may be wondering why I’m going on about a child molester in a magazine for people who sell toys. I certainly don’t enjoy writing about this topic, and perhaps you don’t enjoy reading about it either, but I think it’s important that we do, for a couple of reasons.
One is that I have often written in this column about the state of play in America over the years, expressing my opinion that the parents of today are overprotective. I always get a lot of positive reinforcement from readers on that score, because so many of us have fond memories of our childhoods and are troubled by the lack of unscripted, unsupervised play in kids’ lives.
Fear of “stranger danger” has caused parents to control their children’s play to a much greater extent than past generations, driving them everywhere, staying to watch activities and volunteering to participate as coaches or referees. The threat from strangers, however, is very slight, and probably no greater than it was 50 years ago. We are simply more aware of it.
That doesn’t mean we should disregard it entirely. Not many people are struck by lightening either, but you really shouldn’t play golf during a thunderstorm. Nonetheless, parents (and the rest of us) need to understand that the overwhelming risk to kids comes from friends, relatives and men in positions of authority. Statistics are sketchy because incidents are so under-reported, but as many as a third of all children experience some form of molestation, and it is at least 10 times more likely to come from an acquaintance.
The other reason is that I think everyone needs to be educated about recognizing child sexual abuse, and trained to respond properly. I don’t know how many times in the past month I’ve heard someone say what he would have done had he been in Mike McQueary’s shoes, and had come upon a child being raped. Usually people say they would have physically attacked Sandusky and thrashed him within an inch of his life.
I like to think I would have as well, and yet study after study shows that people do not intervene when confronted by a violent assault. Maybe they are afraid to get involved, or maybe they engage in some form of denial about what they see, or maybe it is just shock, but even the majority of people who say they would take action do not.
Then there is the problem of just not knowing what to do. Should you try to reason with the attacker, call the police, or look for a weapon? Do you take a child to his home or a hospital?
I think training could go a long way toward making the world safer for kids, and I think it would be appropriate for an industry such as ours to take a lead role in developing and distributing that information. Perhaps we came in at the middle of this story, but it’s not too late to help determine the ending.
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