Penn State: Why didn't anyone intervene?

“How could people let this happen?” said Joel Achenbach in WashingtonPost.com. We don’t yet know the full scale of the horror allegedly inflicted by former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was charged last week with using his charitable Second Mile foundation to sexually abuse eight boys. But with reports this week of another 10 victims coming forward, there is a sickening sense that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of a monstrous scandal. What we already know is damning, said Bob Ford in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As far back as 1998, the mother of one boy reported Sandusky—then the team’s defensive coordinator—to university police for groping her son in a shower. Sandusky was allowed to retire shortly thereafter. In 2000, a Penn State janitor reported seeing Sandusky—who still had access to the locker room—performing oral sex on a boy. In 2002, assistant coach Mike McQueary told a grand jury, he caught Sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old in the showers; he then reported what he’d seen to legendary football coach Joe Paterno. Paterno, 84, has now been fired, as have Penn State’s president and athletic director. But the question remains: Did Paterno and Penn State know for more than a decade what Sandusky was doing to boys he was supposedly mentoring, but choose “to keep the lid on, because this was a story that could look bad for everyone?”

If this all sounds a lot like the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandal, said Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail, it’s for a good reason. “College football is the true religion of America,” and like the church, it’s a bastion of male power, wealth, and hypocrisy. Paterno’s Nittany Lions made a profit of $18.5 million last year, on revenues of $106 million, thanks to 100,000 fans attending every home game. At the State College campus, “Joe Pa” is a sainted father figure, which is why Penn State has already turned him into a bronzed statue outside the stadium. That statue tells us why, when Penn State employees saw nauseating scenes in the school’s showers, the “powers at the top decided to protect the brand rather than the kids.”

Let’s not get too sanctimonious, said David Brooks in The New York Times. It’s easy to tell ourselves that if we’d been in Paterno’s shoes, or McQueary’s, we would have turned our good friend Sandusky over to the cops. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that throughout the history of human evil, from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, only a handful of people ever try to intervene, while the vast majority find ways to deceive themselves about what’s happening. Otherwise virtuous people are particularly susceptible to this willful blindness, said Ross Douthat, also in the Times. Paterno may have felt that because he’d done so much good over his 46-year career, he somehow had “higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind.” But not even a lifetime of service to others “can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.”

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So let there be no excuses, said Charles Pierce in Grantland.com, and no sympathy for Paterno, or anyone else complicit in destroying young boys’ lives. Those who said nothing deserve what’s coming to them in the criminal and civil proceedings to come. “There’s nothing that can happen to the university, or to the people sunk up to their eyeballs in this incredible moral quagmire, that’s worse than what happened to the children who got raped.”