Earl Hipp is not happy.
I’m REALLY angry at how one really sick guy can change the world in so many horrible ways. Jerry Sandusky’s perversion, in truth, has damaged the lives of millions of people. He’s has become the Bernie Madoff of pedophiles. If you can stand to even think about all this for just a little longer, try on the following:
The obvious is the depth of the damage to the souls of all the young boys he abused, including his own foster son (one of five). They are men today whose lives and the lives of their families, are now filled with dark corners, churning emotions, hidden pain, and destructive shame. The horror of living with an abuser in your life, even after the abuse has stopped, is really incomprehensible to me.
Then there are the many layers of competent, dedicated, and otherwise good people at Penn State who lost it and made horrible and morally inexplicable decisions to not intervene and protect young boys. People who should have immediately taken physical and legal action against this perverted man and done what we all know was the right thing to do. Instead, they hid in denial hoping to insulate their institution from the necessary and inevitable consequences. Now they, and all the people around them, must try to find a way to cope with the tragic consequences of what they did and didn’t do.
Imagine all the students at Penn State and young people all around the world, looking for guidance from adults. All of these young people who, yet again, have to see adults in large institutions behaving shamefully and letting them down by modeling unethical, selfish, and dishonest behavior.
To the list of those hurt, add all the parents of young males everywhere. They now must wonder if they can trust any youth-serving group, mentoring organization, coaches, male teachers, scoutmasters, the men in their religious institutions, and even the men in their neighborhood. It represents a huge tear in the fabric of community trust.
Of course we have to include Men, as a class, getting kicked in the balls just because they have them. Because the pedophile creeps we hear about are men, now all men are suddenly suspect. Good men who want to show up for young males now have to hold back, or make sure they have a woman with them when they are around boys to avoid indictment. Now there is another reason for men to not trust other men, in general, and certainly not trust them with their sons.
I’m glad this guy has been stopped and will certainly be punished. I’m glad a whole school community, and maybe the world, will get a chance to look in the ethical mirror. But I’m angry at the media, first, because of its relentless hunger for the next sordid detail. Secondly, I’m really angry the media never gives us a counter-point profile of all the men who have made life-giving and often life-saving differences in boys’ lives. Most men can remember guys who showed up for them, but we rarely hear a story about all the gifts they brought and those who today continue to bring into young male lives.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands of lost boys. Young males without fathers or involved male relatives, boys in foster care, in juvenile detention or jail, all the boys who are lost and severely under male-nourished who now will have an even smaller chance of finding a male ally, advocate, or mentor to help them on their journey to manhood. Because of the sick creeps, the really good men who might have shown up for these lost boys must now have even more courage to withstand the insinuation that if they want to help a young male, it might be because they are pedophiles.
Yes, I’m sad and angry at how one very sick man can do so much damage. I’m sad a public and functional definition of a solid, mature, responsible, and generative “good man” is now getting harder to see in the world around us. Yes, I’m really angry that calling men to be man-makers in the lives of all our boys just got a whole lot harder.
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This post originally ran on the Man-Making blog.
—Photo Orange Steeler/Flickr
The word “creepy” is misandrist. Not supporting child abuse here, of course.
“They now must wonder if they can trust any youth-serving group, mentoring organization, coaches, male teachers, scoutmasters, the men in their religious institutions, and even the men in their neighborhood. It represents a huge tear in the fabric of community trust.” I’d like to introduce that sentence to this one: “Then there are the many layers of competent, dedicated, and otherwise good people at Penn State who lost it and made horrible and morally inexplicable decisions to not intervene and protect young boys.” But why intervene — why rock the boat — when it’s so much easier to trust people… Read more »
What I don’t understand is why other men keep covering it up. It just makes no good sense to me.
Interesting how America never found Sandusky “creepy” before now, but now that the allegations are flying, everyone looks at him and sees instantly that of course he’s guilty, just look at him. Has he confessed or been convicted of any crime yet? The public seems to swing back and forth like a pendulum between being naïve and being outraged, trusting and betrayed, innocent and scandalized, over and over. We grant godlike powers without accountability to people in authority and then we are shocked (shocked!) that they would abuse their positions of trust. Meanwhile, the public assumes that child molesters are… Read more »
I’m getting a little sick of hearing about children as strictly innocent, pure little non-human angels who will be forever soiled and damaged by the wrong sort of exposure to sexuality. Seeing children in this way actually encourages pedophilia. It’s just the flip side of the coin. (It also reminds me a bit of the strident crusaders against homosexuality who are themselves closet cases.) How does indulging in this sort of self-righteous anger actually protect victims of abuse? I don’t understand why we can’t fight sexual abuse of children without indulging in all sorts of bizarre fantasies about the sacred… Read more »
You will never know the mind of the abused unless you have lived through it yourself. Abuse is extremely hard to get over. While I agree, that childhood innocence is not so sacred as people make it out to be, but I believe you are wrong in your statement that people that lived through adult sexual abuse simply joke about it and go about their lives as if it’s no big deal. They still have the emotional scars from their abuse, and while the pain may be gone, the scars are still there. It is a part of them.
Crimes against children are the worst. However, my guess is that the many male volunteers who toil away for years or even decades would only get acknowledged if they were to something terrible. Bad guys get press, good guys get ignored. We need some balance here.
I am angry at a society that portrays males as the only major threat to children, when stats show majority of child abuse is perpetrated by females. I am angry at a society which portrays sex crimes as 99% male when stats are showing up to 20% of Child sex offenders are women. I am angry at a society that takes the actions of a few and puts so much fear into people that they see it as the actions of the many. It’s looked down upon to fear black people as criminals, a prejudice, however time n time against… Read more »
Its more to do with groups that conflate these crimes with men in general than anything else.
Women are more likely to abuse children and at least equally likely to abuse their partners, but their abuse is often denied and women as a group are not held accountable for it.
Abuse when its carried out be men is just treated differently.
How many Good Men have considered is they are an Allie of abusers, or if their views and actions protect kids? The PSU and Syracuse stories are nothing new. They just have media opening up a very large can of worms. Anger is the dominant emotion right now, but it’s how that is focused that makes all the difference. If people want to reclaim the situation, then there are many ways to do it. It does not mean having to get laws changed, but that would be very useful. It does not mean excluding yourself and other men from the… Read more »
Earl — well said. Even when I was growing up (late 80s), my dad refused to babysit my sister and her friends for this same reason. Not because he didn’t like kids or didn’t want to be around them, but because he felt that this might open him up to false accusations and misunderstandings of the sort you mention. Which is sad, because I think girls need healthy adult men in their lives just as much as boys do.