Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has now issued his final report on the Penn State scandal, but the question remains: How could so many decent people fail to act when presented with an eyewitness account of sexual abuse of a child?
Jerry Sandusky was convicted in June of 45 counts of child sex abuse. For at least 15 years, he used his assistant-coach position to prey on victims, setting up a charitable foundation that recruited at-risk boys, many of whom he’d abuse on campus and on team road trips as well as at his home.
His colleagues and supervisors turned a blind eye to what should have been suspicious behavior. Worse, they did nothing to try to protect the victims when then-assistant Mike McQueary told them he’d seen Sandusky abusing a child in a campus locker room.
In the Freeh report’s words, university officials demonstrated “total disregard for the safety and welfare of the victims.”
This is no different than similar scandals involving sexual abuse of children by authority figures. In many cases, the guilty parties are not only the perpetrators but those who looked away or, worse, tried to cover up what they knew was happening.
Confronted with evidence that a colleague is abusing vulnerable children, too many fail to intervene. Did we used to be better? Almost 50 years ago, Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered as people watching from nearby apartment windows ignored her screams. And mob lynchings in the United States, complete with crowds egging the murderers on, were shockingly common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, occurring as late as 1964.
Edmund Burke is often credited with saying, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Certainly the good men at Penn State did far too little to protect children.
Each of us should remember this the next time we see something happening we know is wrong.