An ugly thought about the Paterno scandal.. We will never know..

[Stuart G]

Let us imagine for one moment, a a little different story..
Everything is exactly the same except for one detail.

Sandusky was in
that room doing what he was doing...with a 10 year old girl instead of a boy......Now what whould have happened???



I believe without question, the police would have been called in immediately. We will never know of course, but there is an ugly undertow of hatred here. If it was a girl, , now what do you think anyone would feel about Paterno and that grad assistant who discovered this? ..........
... I believe the grad assistant would have called the police immediately, and the rest of this would have come out in 2002. You can believe what you want, and I respect your belief, but that undertow of hate is here.
.... All we know is what really happened...They covered it up and it was a boy.....

Perhaps this thought is a not important...Maybe.. And it probably has been discussed before..but I wanted to say this.
The great football program would not have protected a male predator on a 10 year old girl.
That is what I believe.

[Fumesucker]

1. I don't think it would have made any difference..

It was the cult protecting itself, Sandusky could have been eating the kid's cut-out heart and he would have been covered for I think.

[Stuart G]

3. Maybe so, but I think things would have been different.

That is a feeling I have about this. We will never know.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

5. How do you feel it would've been different? nt

[pearl]

6. I'm with you Stuart

There's something intensely gender specific here. A Male dominated culture. It's puzzling, but your are on to something. I don' know if it would have made a difference but it's almost as if the patriarchy dictated the situation be exactly as it was.

[Tansy_Gold]

8. I agree, Fumesucker.

I just watched the ESPN conversation -- http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7219828/no-one-seems-really-know-former-penn-state-assistant-coach-jerry-sandusky -- in which both the guest, a Jon Ritchie, and one of the three commentators basically said Mike McQueary acted the way they would have acted had they seen an idol (my term, not theirs) raping a 10 year old boy in the shower. They would have run away screaming.

What does that say about a culture -- college football -- that it produces men (?) who will not protect a child? That it produces men (?) who will rally around and defend another man (?) who walked away from the rape of a child and did nothing to stop it?

What angers me, and you can call me sexist if you like but I hope you'll read this all, is that there were mothers who tried to stop this, mothers of children in the Second Mile program who were being abused by Jerry Sandusky, and those mothers tried to protect their children. They may have been single mothers with few resources to fight back against the big and powerful of the Penn State football program, but at least they tried. Two powerless women at least made an effort, and one of them finally brought down the idols.

Jerry Sandusky targeted vulnerable children. His charity addressed children from poor, dysfunctional, and single-parent (which usually means single mother) families. He took children away from the protection of their mothers, including the adoption of one of his children over the protests of the boy's mother in 1995 http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/penn-state-jerry-sandusky-scandal-tracked-back-1995-coach-s-adopted-son-report-article-1.976557?localLinksEnabled=false

If there is a parallel between the horror that has gone on at Penn State and the horror that is the Catholic church, I think it's because both are such resolutely male, all-male, anti-woman cultures. I think if McQueary had walked in on Sandusky raping a 10-year-old girl, he wouldn't even have been distraught and probably wouldn't have even told his father about it. It was just a girl, after all.

I live with a sports fanatic. In the almost 50 years I've known him, he's always been involved in sports in one way or another. A one-time Olympic track hopeful, he was also offered an opportunity with an MLB farm team. For years he was a coach of boys' and girls' baseball and softball teams, then went into umpiring. He just left this morning to umpire a girls' softball tournament. When I asked him a question about football the other day, a question that should have had a one or two-sentence answer -- are guys who play the defensive end position usually great big huge guys or not? -- I got a long lecture on the history of defensive ends, a comparison of them with linebackers, what they do and how they do it and who are the good ones and how the position has changed over the years, etc., etc., etc. He eats, drinks, sleeps, breathes sports, and he knows what he's talking about.

And because of his long association with kids and sports -- which goes back at least to 1965 when he was a parks and rec supervisor in the Chicago suburb we both grew up in -- he's always put the kids first. Last summer he threw a kids' baseball coach out of a game because the coach told the players to do things that weren't safe for themselves and other players. When the coach told the kids to ignore the umpire's instructions because "I don't care if you get hurt as long as you win," the coach was ejected, was reported to the league's board, and is no longer coaching.

So his reaction to the McQueary story was, "Bullshit. He shoulda stopped it, first and foremost. McQueary's a big guy, with almost 30 years on Sandusky. He could've stopped it and he didn't. The safety of the kids comes first. If he couldn't do that, if he's so worried about his job or anything else that he can't save the kid first, then he doesn't deserve to be in the program. And if the program permits that, then the program needs to go."

I, too, think football at Penn State had become a cult, a cult of winning at all costs and never questioning anyone in a position of authority within the cult. And it took people -- women, mothers -- from outside the cult to bring it down.


Tansy Gold, mother and grandmother

[LAGC]

2. You make a good point.

There is this unspoken assumption that boys are more at fault for their own abuse than girls, after all they are YOUNG MEN, surely they can more easily stand up for themselves? There is more of a shame factor, which is why boys are far less likely to report abuse when it happens to them.

I think maybe in McQueary's mind, he actually thought the boy was a willing participant in the abuse, and didn't see him as much as a victim.

Of course, he was dead wrong, but such an assumption may have caused him to hesitate, then do the cowardly thing he did and just walk away...

[Sarah Ibarruri]

4. Well, for one, it wouldn't still be in the news. He'd have been thrown in prison...

and this scandal wouldn't have gone on for months.

[Evergreen Emerald]

7. I disagree completely. And I go further:

I believe that if it had been a female, there would not be the community outrage over complicity that we are seeing now. The team would have handled the case the same--nothing would have come out. And if it had, the community would be silent.

And, we only need to look at the prevalence in our community of crimes against women and the reactions to those crimes--minimizing, blaming the victim, looking for reasons not to hold the perps accountable.

We have become accustomed.

[EFerrari]

13. The only reason you know about crimes against women

is because people talk about them now.

Underage male victims of assault probably go to jail more often than they get help. :(

[JohnnyLib2]

9. Discussions about it verge toward posses and lynch mobs (verbally).

I haven't noticed this much outrage about males raping females in many years, and that includes rape/murder of civilians in the war zones.

The only recent comparison I can make is the reaction to Abu G. prison photos---of men being abused.

Best guess: Sandusky might have been arrested and the whole episode relatively hushed up.

[seabeyond]

10. girls have been used as mans plaything for ever. it is more a norm, so in a way, it would be more

allowed than a boy. many men have the immediate, it is wrong, with a boy. not a girl.

this kinda situation, people dont look, regardless, with the gender. it is about power. entitlement. greed. not about, what is right

girls would be treat as insignificantly as a boy. we see it daily. check out child sex slave and a thread on child pornography.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=2295194&mesg_id=2295194

[Navymom192]

11. This is about more than protecting a football program.

People keep asking "Why didn't Mcqueary do something to
help the boy that very second?  Some say it was because
football is 

a religion and no one wanted to sully the rep of a team or
coach. THE ORIGIN OF THIS PROBLEM is deeper than football 

or a coaches lack of action. It is because MEN do not consider
crimes that involve sex as a crime. I can prove this 

too you in one sentence. If this coach Mcqueary had walked
into the shower and Sandusky was beating a 10 year boy old 

with his fists,a child standing there crying with a bruised
face, busted lip and a black eye, do you think for a 

second that the coach would have closed the door and walked
away? Of course not !! He did it because rape is still 

seen as a sexual thing rather than a violence thing in most
men's minds. Their immediate instinct is to say to 

themselves that it is a private matter and think... should I
or shouldn't I get involved? For centuries men said what 

happens in a mans' castle is his own business. This absolved
them of any responsibility to deal with their own 

friends, brothers, uncles who were beating their wives and
children. Thankfully it is no longer accepted to beat your 

wife. But it wasn't the men who made that change, it was the
women would stood up and said..." no more". Men must


teach their sons that rape, force and submission are not
sexual outlets, they are violent crimes.

[Angry Dragon]

14. A very good post

welcome to DU

[lumberjack_jeff]

12. Agree. n/t