UNITED STATES
Verdict
What Penn State, Horace Mann, the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Have Taught Us: We Need Child-Sex-Abuse Whistleblower Laws
Marci A. Hamilton
The latest child-sex-abuse debacle is the cover-up involving a series of men who abused children at the elite New York private school Horace Mann. Add that to the now well-known stories of powerful men covering up abuse at Penn State, within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, within the Roman Catholic Church, and within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and it is safe to say that there is something very wrong with the way in which men in power at male-dominated institutions have handled child sex abuse.
In each of these cases, the men in power have learned about heinous child sex abuse, and then simply sat on their hands.
Some Examples of the Failure to Zealously Prosecute Child Sex Abuse
Most recently—in fact, just this week—we learned that, in 2001, in a series of emails among Penn State’s then-President Graham Spanier, Gary Schultz, and Tim Curley, the three decided that the “humane” thing to do was not to go to the authorities about Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children. That is to say, they left Sandusky at large, unidentified as a child predator, in the midst of circles of children, from the Penn State/Second Mile football camps to the local high school football teams. This rings of the Catholic bishops’ practice of forgiving abusers, and then shuttling them from parish to parish.
Prosecutors also have, at times, been less than aggressive in going after abusers in religious communities. For decades, it was commonplace for district attorneys to decline to prosecute Catholic priests who were accused of abuse, out of respect for the bishops who asked not to have their dirty linen aired in public. The D.A.s, along with anyone else who learned about such abuse, believed at the time that the bishops would do what was best for children.
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