Reflections on Penn State and Syracuse

By now mostly everyone may know about the two major child sex abuse scandals that have occurred at two major colleges, both of these occurred on the east coast. First, the story of Jerry Sandusky at Penn State came out and then soon after allegations came out on a coach at Syracuse University’s coach Bernie Fine. At Penn State Jerry Sandusky is being accused of molesting children in the showers after hosting a charity program on the Penn State campus. These boys were about 10-12 years old and the story was essentially covered up by some Penn State officials for many years until the boys spoke out now many years later.  The situation just disgusts me that this was allowed to go on in the showers of a major university like this and that no one stepped up and said anything to authorities outside of the University. Based on the story that was released to the media I man saw Sandusky in action and reported it to the superiors in the school but did not call authorities outside; no one did. As a result of no one calling the school president, athletic director, and legendary coach Joe Paterno were all let go from the school. Sandusky’s lawyer stated that Jerry was just showing these under privileged boys how to use soap in the shower which I personally believe is a joke that he would have his well respected lawyer say that. There is no way around the fact that Sandusky is guilty, but the question is could this have been prevented? Of course it could have and the officials of Penn State should have been looking into Sandusky but they didn’t do anything they let him do whatever he wanted because he used to coach there. This could have been prevented and I now know this based on the training we received last week in class that we simply just have to call a hotline if we are even suspicious of anyone. The case of Bernie Fine at Syracuse is a little bit different in that Fine did not perform his sexual abuse at the school and under the schools facilities. Also, there is no accusing of anyone associated with the school knowing what Bernie Fine was doing to these ball boys for the team. Either way Fine was abusing these boys in the basement of his own home and no one was really suspicious of him. I feel that a red flag should have been up when Fine was bringing these boys back to his house and maybe someone should have looked into it, but no one did and these boys were sexual abused. No matter what way you look at a sexual abuse situation they can be prevented in one way or another. As a future educator I know what signs to look for so I can report something or just talk to a student to see if anything is actually going on because the things that Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine did to these boys shouldn’t happen to anyone.