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

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.

True. You're right about that, and also that, once he got over that freezing response, he should have called the cops.

once he got over that freezing response, he should have called the cops.

Absolutely. Should have had his phone in his hand by the time he hit the outer doors. There's no justification for not calling the cops.

amych's brainspew is pretty coherent, I have to say.

I am now watching The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie. Sadly, it's not really improving my mood.

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).

smonster, I was JUST saying this EXACT SAME THING to N. at work and almost posted it here. We are psychic twins, as always. Imagine if Dean Smith hadn't retired, and was still coaching, and if this had come to light about Phil Ford. I can totally see students rioting, sadly. And what's worse, I can't even imagine it. That's how much I idolize Dean Smith. And I'm not even that rabid a sports fan. One of my good friends named her dog after him, and the guy across the hall here at work named his son after him. It just doesn't compute that he would sweep something like that under the rug, but it could happen. We don't call it the Carolina Mafia half-jokingly for nothing.

Part of what I think is going on is that the students just can't believe it. I'm not excusing their behavior, it disgusts and horrifies me, but I can see it happening here, and that makes me sad and sick.

Part of what I think is going on is that the students just can't believe it.

Yeah, I've seen a number of comments about how (a) these are just allegations; and (b) we don't know what Paterno knew.

And it's true that a Grand Jury report isn't a judge's sentence, and the standard of proof isn't beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's not like this shit was made up out of whole cloth! People just don't want to believe it.

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. Where every adult feels the same responsibility to protect kids, or anyone being abused.

Because it needs to be said over and over, though it damn well shouldn't HAVE to be.

I've seen speculation that McQueary may have been abused by Sandusky himself as a child. That seems a long shot, but he did grow up in State College and went to school with Sandusky's kids, and I can see someone with that background walking in on the legendary and honored defensive coach he's known since he was 6 raping a little kid and being so stunned he'd question his own sanity. Like, "Can this even be? Did I just have some kind of evil hallucination?"

But, you know, probably then you decide omg this is real and call the cops.