By John Zaremba
Boston Herald
November 11, 2011
http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1380058&srvc=news&position=2
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| SCANDAL SHOCKS: Former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno, right, poses with his defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky in 1999. Sandusky was charged with sexually assaulting eight boys. |
Penn State’s alleged pedophilia cover-up could prove to be a powder keg that explodes into a nationwide scandal of Catholic clergy-abuse proportions, rocking colleges and other cloistered institutions where child molestation may have gone unreported for years, experts said yesterday.
“The sexual abuse revelations at Penn State are a further tip of the sexual abuse iceberg that exists in this country and in the world,” said attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who won millions in settlements for scores of victims preyed on as children by Boston archdiocese priests.
“Victims in many institutions, whether they be educational or otherwise, will come forward to reveal the fact they were sexually abused. What has happened in Penn State has empowered victims, just as the Catholic Church cases have empowered victims to come forward,” he added.
Other experts said colleges and universities must investigate themselves immediately in response to the horrific news coming out of Happy Valley, where Jerry Sandusky, a longtime coach in the school’s hallowed football program and a founder of a youth-outreach program there, is charged with sexually assaulting eight boys during a period of years.
“There are going to be memos flying around,” said George Leef, research director at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C. Penn State’s ouster of school president Graham Spanier and legendary football coach Joe Paterno should have a chilling effect on college brass everywhere, he said.
“It’s sort of like witnessing an execution,” Leef said. “You’ve just seen America’s most revered football coach go down in ignominy, a university president get fired. Nobody’s going to want that to happen. Nobody’s going to take the chance.”
Dan Lebowitz, who leads Northeastern University’s Sport in Society center, said Penn State’s gold-standard athletic department has now set an example of a different sort — how not to handle shocking criminal accusations against its own staff.
“It sort of equated child sexual abuse with an NCAA infraction. It is not. It’s just an egregious lack of judgment,” Lebowitz said. “When we come to a point in our world where we’re equating child sexual abuse with an NCAA infraction, we’ve lost our way.”
Meanwhile, a Beacon Hill lawmaker announced plans to expand the state’s law on who must report suspected child abuse. State Rep. Kevin J. Kuros (R-Uxbridge) a Penn State alum, said he wants the law to apply to all state employees in addition to selected professions such as medical personnel, educators, clergy, cops and firefighters.
Contact: john.zaremba@bostonherald.com
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