Wolf writes: "Victims sense when everyone is in on protecting an abuser. They suffer three times over: first, the abuse itself; then, the betrayal of trust; and finally, the denial of the reality of their experience. It is that knowing act of suppression that makes such conspiracies criminal."
Portrait, author and activist Naomi Wolf, 10/19/11. (photo: Guardian UK)
07 July 12
Society prefers to think of its Jerry Sanduskys as lone predators. In reality, they can only exist because of a culture of collusion.
onspiracy theorists are pretty much always treated as if they are insane. The notion that powerful people might secretly conspire to conceal evidence or direct an outcome - at the expense of the powerless - is often portrayed by mainstream culture and media as entirely irrational.
Indeed, there are crazy conspiracy theories out there (global warming is a hoax, anyone?). But sometimes, real conspiracies do take shape and those in power do collude to direct outcomes in secret. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of sexual abusers in elite institutions.
Recently, a slew of such elite institutions - from Yale University to the United States military (which we explored in our discussion of The Invisible War) - have been exposed as having become aware of systematic sexual abuse, and having suppressed evidence of it.
On 22 June of this year, Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State University, was found guilty of abusing ten boys over the course of a decade and a half. At first, the Sandusky case at Penn State seemed like that of a lone abuser. Now, it seems to be turning into a story of extensive and shockingly high-level coverup of the known rape of children. A new trove of emails from 2001, read by a firsthand source to a CNN reporter last week, suggest that 15 young lives were not just ruined because Sandusky abused vulnerable boys for over 15 years, but were ruined, too, because powerful men around Sandusky knew exactly what he was doing - and colluded in detail with one another not to stop it.
In CNN's report on "disturbing emails" from principals around the 2001 Penn State abuse incidents, which were read to the reporter by a source who had access to them, a profoundly alarming pattern is clear. The emails show a whistleblower doing the right thing: in February 2001, graduate assistant Mike McQueary advised head coach Joe Paterno that he had seen what he believed to be Sandusky sexually interacting with a boy in a shower in the locker room. McQueary testified in the Sandusky trial that he saw Sandusky sexually assaulting the child.
Two administrators, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, authority figures on campus - the only ones who could have gone to authorities - allegedly discussed a firsthand report of Sandusky abusing a ten-year-old child in a shower. They nearly decided to alert the police - or child protection officials - then allegedly agreed not to do so.
Schultz and Curley now assert that McQueary disclosed having witnessed merely "inappropriate conduct": "horsing around". Schultz and Curley both deny the allegations against them that they mishandled the original complaint and later lied to a grand jury investigation about it; they have asked a judge to dismiss the charges.
The alleged scenario, though, is familiar: institutional sympathy and leniency for a reported predator at the expense of the victim. The email trail also implicates Penn State's former president, Graham Spanier. Allegedly responding to the purported plan of Schultz and Curley to downgrade the incident and not report it to the Department of Welfare (which investigates child sexual abuse cases). Spanier reportedly writes that this approach is "acceptable" and "humane and reasonable", but worries that "the only downside for us is if the message [to Sandusky] isn't 'heard' and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it."
These alleged exchanges reproduce precisely the classic reactions to revelations of sexual abuse in groups ranging from families, to churches, to colleges. No one says, "We have a firsthand witness of the molestation of a child! And it's plausible because the police already investigated this guy for a similar reported incident. He has constant, unsupervised access to children: we need to report this guy at once and alert everyone responsible for their wellbeing!"
Instead, there is a collusive and immediate distancing of responsibility. There is - again, classically also - a collusive minimization of harm to the child; the abstraction of the child to an insignificant cipher ("the subject"); and finally, there is the joint agreement to extend the peculiar empathy patriarchy always seems to find at the prospect of a respected white man facing any public shame or discomfort. Better to sacrifice the victim's welfare and hide the affair from the scrutiny of justice, than endure the intolerable prospect of a high-status and trusted white man's secret sexual vices being exposed.
What is especially heartbreaking about the victims in this case is that these children, who were enrolled in Sandusky's Second Mile charity, were already vulnerable: they had no parents to confide in or to defend them, no adults around who would have been safe to speak to. That is the nature of a successful conspiracy: a watertight, 360-degree plot with no escape for its ensnared victims. That would have been these kids' reality.
One victim described at the Sandusky trial how, when Sandusky would abuse him in a basement, he knew Mrs Sandusky was on the floor above watching TV - but knew there was no point in going to her. That child would have picked up - as kids and victims in general do in a collusive coverup situation - that there would be no point in going to the Penn State authorities or other responsible adults.
Victims sense when everyone is in on protecting an abuser. They suffer three times over: first, the abuse itself; then, the betrayal of trust; and finally, the denial of the reality of their experience. It is that knowing act of suppression that makes such conspiracies criminal.
