McQueary should have called 911. AFTER he pulled Sandusky off the kid and beat the shit out of him.

IJS Seems the natural reaction. I can't imagine struggling with what to do when you see a child assaulted.

but we don't address what do you do when someone you trust abuses you.

Thus begins the stabination.

Exactly! These kids are so afraid of doing something wrong that when wrong is done to them, they have nowhere to turn. We talk about stranger-danger in classrooms, but we don't address what do you do when someone you trust abuses you.

Yeah. One of the kids who did report it, what happened was he came home and said to his mother something like, "If you're wondering why my hair is wet, it's because Coach and I took a shower together." Then he went to his room. And the mother was like, "What?!?!" and talked to him enough to get him to tell enough details to realize that she needed to call the police. Not many kids will actually go find someone to directly tell.

I need to post a fun trivia fact before I have a rage blackout in my office.

Yeah. I'm a nasty funk today already, Penn State aside. I think I need to go watch something ridiculous. Or look at pictures of cute animals or something.

McQueary will be coaching Saturday, but it will be a "game-day decision" whether he's actually on the field or somewhere inside.

Well, I think the state and the feds need to get involved with this given the police involved may have done something wrong.

The guy who said it was boundary issues was the state welfare department "expert."

As was pointed out earlier, in some states everyone is required to report child abuse.

I like to think that wouldn't happen here under similar circumstances, but I can't say that it wouldn't.

It totally could, the rioting at least. Imagine if Ford:Sandusky::Smith:Paterno. And I know some of Ford's falls off the wagon were brushed under the carpet. Comparing Paterno to Smith helped me understand, just a little, the feeling of betrayal (but let me be clear that the rioting students are failing at human decency, I just mean the sense of betrayal in a beloved icon). Also, two initials: B and B.

The one thing I can say about McQueary is that I can sort of see him being unable to react at the time because what he saw was so shocking and unexpected, and because it involved someone inherently senior to him.

Which is not a justification for not calling the cops, but I think it goes a little ways towards explaining why he didn't immediately grab the kid away and beat Sandusky down. He probably got a huge burst of adrenaline, and he had been trained for what, ten years, to respect and obey the coaches, so that when it came to the fight-or-flight response, he went with flight instead of fight.

He should have called the cops immediately, even if he couldn't bring himself to do anything himself about the poor boy. That's on him.

But I know from personal experience that when something really shocking and unexpected happens, I sometimes freeze, and can't act immediately. I'm not going to call that a moral failing--I think it's a natural physiological response. It takes training to get over that, for a lot of people.

are college teachers/admin/coaches considered state mandated reporters like Pre-K-12 teachers?

No, because it's assumed that the people they're in contact with are legal adults. Which doesn't mean they aren't and shouldn't be governed by other sets of rules, just that it's out of that jurisdiction. Which leads me to:

I want to live in a world where you don't have to be "state mandated" to report an adult raping a child to the police.

At which I can only say THIS. and THIS again. and also THIS. Because the mandate is a sign that people wouldn't do otherwise. And:

If the culture is so fucking warped that that damn game is more important to these people than the hell those children went through and will continue to have to deal with, then I think that culture should be torn down.

I have a lot of really conflicty and ambivalent and possibly unamerican feelings about sports and sports culture and ESPECIALLY big-name big-money university sports culture when it doesn't involve child-rape. But in the current situation, this sums it up really well.

The whole Penn State mess hits close to home here. My life is filled with coaches and athletes. We discussed the likely scenario if one of our coaches encountered child assault in the locker room. Consensus is that calling the cops would be the 3rd thing to happen. After 1. Grabbing the child and moving him to a safe location and 2. Beating the crap out of the perpetrator. So many of the adults in my life are coaches and I honestly cannot imagine them protecting one of their fellows in this case. I'm personally not a violent person, but I know these guys well enough to know that violence is how they would respond to that kind of abuse of power.

I see every single day the relationship between coaches and the children they guide and I can't even express how sick this matter makes me. My experience has been watching boys learn, grow, and succeed under the caring guidance of coaches. The contrast to what I see happened at Penn (and other places of course) just makes me sick.

Laura lives in my world. And I'm really angry and heartsick, mostly for the bare facts of what went down with those kids, but with an added return kick-in-the-gut that I also know what a violation it is of a kind of relationship that is absolutely precious to me. Coaching is like a weird mix of teaching and parenting, and there has to be so much trust built into it, and it's so damned easy to abuse because of that trust; and it gets so trampled when money or power or whatever get into the mix. And every coach I know (which includes my husband, my own coaches, a lot of my best friends) holds to that trust so damned hard, and this is just such a hateful twisting of that whole dynamic.

Fuck.

oh hai giant brainspew