Nor should the trustees, the governor, members of the Board of Second Mile and local police and legal services get off the hook, too. My concern is for the process by which these things can be addressed and corrected. There are many people who have been terribly harmed by this and many more will be terribly harmed by this in the future depending on how the situation is dealt with. Huge changes must be made and procedures brought into place that make the present reality all but impossible to reoccur. However, it is naive to believe that can be done in any absolute sense.
Consider how it has been all but impossible to reform the Roman Catholic Church and the endemic institutional neglect to address these very same issues where similarly protecting the institution was deemed more important than protecting the victims. The number involved at all levels within the RCA, victims, priests, and administrators dwarfs the scale of the events at PSU and has been known for decades and yet we keep hearing of new nightmares in different places. Consider how little visible change has occurred.
In my denomination we strongly encourage today that all people working directly with children have background searches and be cleared for such contact. Do you how hard that is to convince congregational boards to move on such suggestions? The innertia is huge, it is like sweeping boulders with whisk brooms.
In rural PA, an area still struggling to recover from the events of 2008 and the ongoing recession, the economic impact of an NCAA death penalty for the football program will be devastating, not simply to Penn State but to the dozens of small venders who sell pretzels, ice cream, and many other goods surrounding the games. As it impacts those venders it will impact their families and their children. It will impact the hotels and restaurants up and down the 322 cooridor where fans stay and eat as they travel to and from the games. It will lessen the dollars for women's sports like basketball, soccer and volleyball. Some men's and women's sports will likely be completely cut and eliminated but it won't be football which even with a death penalty will be rebuilt because in America today that is where the money is. It will impact the whole geographic region economically. It will lessen the tax base and even lead to reductions in staffing county government including the offices of Youth and Family Services who are charged with the responsibility of keeping our children safe at the very time when we need to strengthen that work.
It will affect both Penn State fans and those people who have always hated PSU. You would be surprised how many folks are in that category.
None of that is to say that decisions and punishments must not be made but knee jerk and reactionary responses built on emotion run the risk of doing tremendous harm to thousands and tens of thousands of people who never knew anything while doing nothing to actually secure the future safety of our kids. What must be done must be done carefully and deliberately or else the number of innocent victims will be expanded exponentially not by the evil of Jerry Sandusky but by the well intended onlookers who do not live with the problem every day because they do not know the families and kids who have been hurt. The good people of the central valleys of PA deserve the opportunity to set their own house in order now that they know the truth of what went on at PSU. If they don't want to fix the problem then no amount of punishment from outside will ever solve it. I know these people and I believe they are very capable of solving what is for them a personal affront to their most personal core values.
There is, also, an opportunity in all of this. There is an opportunity to learn how to put together a quality system of checks and balances that insures that no one has the power to be above the system ever again. Since training is the greatest predictor of the likelihood to report Penn State can install a broad system of training of exactly how to idenify potential predators and abusers like Jerry Sandusky and exactly how to report any suspicions and to whom to report them and how to properly follow up when one has cause to believe nothing is happening with the report. Penn State now has the opportunity to resolve how to stop such abuses immediately in a way that has even escaped the RCA which has the unenviable reality of being a global organization with millions involved. And in doing this what is learned at Penn State can help communities everywhere by becoming a model of how to do it the right way and to look the problem straight on.
Rather than rushing to decisions I believe the best path for the NCAA would be to put PSU on probation for 5 or even ten years with specific review dates for establishing a plan of action for review by the best professionals in the field, the establisment of a Chair of Child Protection study, plus intermediate reports dates to ensure compliance with set goals for training all staff are being met, and the establishment of a process by which what is learned here can be shared across the region and all of the NCAA. A decision like that by the NCAA could be something that benefits all of us no matter where we live and a huge step forward in the battle against child sexual abuse.
