By Paula Reed Ward
Philly.com
November 14, 2011
http://articles.philly.com/2011-11-13/news/30394152_1_football-team-showers-sexual-assault-joe-paterno
 |
| Forced to resign as Penn State president , Graham Spanie r is accused of failing to act… (HUNTER MARTIN / Getty Images) |
At least three people knew of the alleged sexual assault of a child in the Pennsylvania State University football team showers by a well-known, respected, and popular former coach of the Nittany Lions in the days after a 2000 incident.
And two years later, one university employee witnessed the sexual assault of a child by the same man in the same place, and at least six others were told about it, according to court documents.
Still, not one of them - from a janitor to a graduate assistant to a university president - went to the police to report it.
From the public perspective over the last week, this apparent moral failing is nothing short of abhorrent. Most people agree there would be an obligation to report the abuse of children and that many people, when faced with the same decision, would have made the "right" choice.
But experts say it can't be summed up quite so easily.
Instead, the behavior of those men can be explained, at least in part, by psychological factors or a lack of ethical training at the university level, experts said.
"Anyone who thinks that they could not possibly get caught up in this [type of] situation is fooling themselves," said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
"It's incredibly simplistic to look at this situation and say, 'Penn State is rife with evil and corruption.'
"I don't think the distinction is so clear-cut." What likely happened, Loewenstein said, was "a perfect storm for disaster."
"It's all about how even the most ethical, morally upright people - if they get into a bad situation - will take actions that violate their own ethical principles," Loewenstein said.
The allegations last week were startling: that university president Graham Spanier, a sociologist and family therapist, and Joe Paterno, long the face and heart of Penn State football, failed in their duty to act on reports of child sex abuse.
Also implicated were then-athletic director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, former senior vice president for finance and business, who were charged with failing to report the incident and lying about it in their grand jury testimony.
It is almost impossible to say exactly why the officials acted as they did. Was it allegiance to a friend, Jerry Sandusky, the longtime defensive coordinator now charged with sexually abusing eight boys? Or was it allegiance to Penn State football, or to the university as an institution?
Simon Keller, a philosophy professor who taught at Boston University and now teaches in New Zealand, said often loyalty can create its own "moral universe."
When that happens, Keller said, the relationship and the duties to the people inside that universe become the only things that matter.
"They had a temptation to ask first: 'What does this mean for my friend? What does it mean for my university and our football program?' " Keller said. "And it is easy to see why, when those are the first questions asked, it could seem, from the perspective of the moral universe created by those loyal relationships, that the right thing to do was to keep the allegations secret."
But, Keller continued, a basic ideal of moral virtue is the ability to take a wider perspective - to feel sympathy.
"In this case, it is absolutely obvious that the wider moral obligation to protect real, vulnerable humans was far more important than any obligation of friendship or any obligation to an ethereal entity like 'the university' or 'the program,' " Keller said.
Loewenstein said that what likely was at play in the failure to report the purported acts was a psychological phenomenon known as "diffusion of responsibility."
"There were a lot of people around who seemed to be aware of what was going on and thought it was someone else's responsibility to do something," he said.
The individuals kept following the hierarchy of the administration until the information - likely skewed and watered down by that point - got to the top, he said.
Spanier denied in his testimony to the grand jury that the incident was reported to him as something "sexual in nature," according to the presentment made public Nov. 5 by the state Attorney General's Office.
"The human brain is remarkably adept at believing what it wants to believe," Loewenstein said. "When there's something we don't want to believe, we process information much differently."
Spanier testified that Curley and Schultz told him in 2002 of an incident involving Sandusky that made a member of Curley's staff "uncomfortable," according to the grand jury's report.
And in his testimony denying that the incident was reported to him as "sexual in nature," Spanier described it as "Jerry Sandusky in the football building locker area in the shower . . . with a younger child and that they were horsing around in the shower," the grand jury stated.
Still, wouldn't the prospect of a grown man in the shower with a young boy prompt some review?
The refusal to believe such charges can be a completely automatic, unconscious, involuntary process, Loewenstein said.
"People are going to be powerfully motivated to not believe this colleague is abusing young boys," Loewenstein said. "The last thing people want to do is discover that this widely beloved, respected person is evil and corrupt."
That lack of ability on the part of Penn State officials to see the seriousness of the matter seemed to continue in the early days after the news broke.
Mr. Spanier issued a statement Nov. 5 saying that Mr. Curley and Mr. Schultz had his "unconditional support."
The Rev. James F. Keenan, a theology professor at Boston College, does not see the failure by Penn State officials to inform police about the reported crimes as a societal moral failing.
"I think average people are doing fine," he said.
But, he continued, teaching institutions are not.
"There's no ethical accountability built into the training of someone who goes into [university] administration or teaching," he said.
Keenan compared the current Penn State situation to the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Neither university officials nor church officials are required to undergo ethics training that would prepare them to deal with conflicting allegiances and moral dilemmas involved in their work, he said.
In both instances, he wondered, "Why didn't the basic human question - 'This is wrong. This is reportable' - why weren't those words spoken?
"Why weren't they acted on?"
The decision by the Penn State board of trustees to fire Paterno and ask Spanier to resign sent a good message, Keenan said.
"Here, we're seeing a greater level of accountability - the people in charge [are leaving]," he said.
That did not happen in the church, Keenan continued. The priests who were accused may have been removed, but it was rare that anyone higher up was affected, he said.
"There's just something about these institutions. They're in another world."
Although Keenan acknowledged that fidelity may have been at play among the people who chose not to go to the police, he said it should not have been.
Fidelity applies to long-term, intimate relationships, such as with a spouse or sibling or parent, he continued, or even to a professional, doctor-patient relationship.
"I don't see any of that here," he said. "I don't see anything that could compromise calling the police [to say] that children are being raped. They all have the responsibility to protect these children."
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.