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
About Earl Hipp
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.
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 lives of children. It does mean educating yourself and people around you to the risks, how to recognize issues and how to react.
Kids do not respond well to anger – so one thing is “Can The Anger” and use it wisely. If kids see angry parents over this issue, then the kids are unlikely to tell such a parent of things that trouble them.
Who would the Kids talk to – The angry male figures or the ones who are nice and give them money, gifts and who speak very quietly and reassuringly?
Angry men make themselves allies to pedophiles and enable them! Which is better – be an Allie to kids, or those who seek to abuse the kids?
I have heard some adults saying how am I supposed to react? That is their choice – they can let rip in front of Kids and scare the bejesus out of the kids – or the adult can take the anger to somewhere private and deal with it as a personal issue.
Abusers seek private and quite situations to commit abuse and they whisper in young ears. Parents who are publicly angry in front of kids set the wrong example.
Make sure that as a good man you are aware how your views and anger can be driving your kids towards an abuser. Make sure you are not at fault in being an Unwitting Allie to that which you find repugnant!
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.
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 there is a prejudice against men being trusted around children. It’s gotten so bad that children are suffering from a lack of male role-models, because many are so nervous of spending quality time with them for fear of being labelled the modern day witch. Male schoolteachers, especially in the primary years are becoming extremely rare, male preschool teachers and child carers have parents asking for them to be fired simply for being male.
I am angry at the men and women who abuse one n another, and children. But I am also angry at society for allowing the hysteria over child abuse to continue to the point of HARMING society by essentially trying to kill off healthy interactions between male adults and children. What kind of world is this when adult males aren’t able to interact with children, whilst also being accused of not helping enough or showing enough interest in being fathers, child carers, taking an interest in children’s lives?
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’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 fragility of childhood. It’s wrong and it’s a crime because children are too young to consent to sex, not because they are fragile angelic beings. By making children into icons of innocence, we are actually fueling pedophilia, it seems to me.
I feel disgusted by these cases as well, but on some level society is not ready to face the fact that in SOME cases it is adults making a bigger deal of it than the children themselves. I imagine at Oxford and Cambridge today are many young men who are survivors of adult sexual abuse in the elite boarding school system who today just joke about it and go about their lives quite successfully. This is no excuse for any of it, but I wonder if all of this obsession is a particularly American thing.
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.
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 very easy to spot. Many of us have actually used the expression “looks like a child molester.” Then, lo and behold, we realize we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that people we admire just couldn’t abuse children. I mean, they’re in positions of authority because they’re good people, right?
A lot of the disillusionment in the Penn State case is just the fall from such a great height. We’re outraged because we’ve elevated college football to such dizzying heights. Legendary gridiron giants have proven to be just as capable of evil as anyone else. Shocker. You can’t tell me this would have made the national news if the accused was the Dean of the PSU Libraries or even a coach of the women’s soccer team.
Is anyone truly shocked that a big-name college football program would cover up illegal activities? If you are, you have not really been paying attention to the police blotter in your local college town. You have not been paying attention to all the times the NCAA has cracked down.
What I don’t understand is why other men keep covering it up. It just makes no good sense to me.
I’d like to introduce that sentence to this one:
But why intervene — why rock the boat — when it’s so much easier to trust people like Sandusky?
That’s a core issue here, I think. For someone like Mike McQueary, Sandusky was something of a father figure. So, he observes him engaging in the act of rape (or just horseplay?) and what doesn’t happen is this: the “I trust/respect this man” part of his brain didn’t immediately turn off with the input of the new information. Instead, he experienced cognitive dissonance — cognitive dissonance! — making him have difficulty figuring out what to do in a situation so seemingly obvious.
That’s the kind of pattern we need to eliminate, and I think that diminishing our automatic respect for “trust” may help. By trusting people, you cast certain possibilities into the realm of the impossible and unthinkable, so when they do happen, they still didn’t happen. Sandusky didn’t rape anyone — he mustn’t have — because we can trust him. He’s a nice guy! That’s the kind of blindness we must fight. Evil often is nice; that’s how it gets away with it.
In this particular situation, notions like “loyalty” and “school spirit” also played their part. Even now, people are saying things like “I haven’t lost my faith in Penn State, of course”, as if there’s something inherently important about having a good opinion of a particular university! I myself strive for no opinion whatsoever about institutions, because in that particular situation, opinion is necessarily bias, and it will lead me to disregard inconventiently bad or good facts.
The word “creepy” is misandrist. Not supporting child abuse here, of course.