He trusted Paterno, the ultimate authority and mentor of the organization, to handle it. Or not. Maybe he was wrong to be so upset about it. That sounds really screwed up, and it is. But consider the famous Stanley Milgram experiment. In Milgram, a Yale psychologist, put two subjects at a time on separate sides of a wall.
If the second subject gave a wrong answer, the teacher was ordered by a researcher—the authority figure—to press a button to administer an electric shock to the other participant. With each wrong answer, the electric shock got 15 volts stronger, topping off at a potentially lethal volts. At one point during the experiment, the actor complained about a heart condition.
At another, he fell completely silent. Still, 65 percent of teachers administered the electric shocks till the end of the experiment. Milgram theorized that our ability to ignore our own conscience under the influence of authority explains how Hitler got so many ordinary citizens—almost all men—to kill for him.
The Milgram experiment has been repeated many times in the years since, as recently as last year, and the results have been remarkably consistent: 60 to 65 percent of teachers obey the white-coated researcher till the bitter end.
Lubit says maybe. A judge ruled late Friday that prosecutors do have probable cause to move forward with the cases against Tim Curley and Gary Schultz -- a decision that widely expected. Under cross-examination, McQueary answered a question that many observers had asked: Why didn't he call police on Sandusky?
He says it was because it was "delicate in nature" and that he tried to use his best judgment. He says he was "sure the act was over. He says he later informally raised questions to people he worked with about why Sandusky was still allowed around the football program. Speaking for the first time in public about the encounter in a Penn State locker room, McQueary said he believes that Sandusky was attacking the child with his hands around the boy's waist but said he wasn't percent sure it was intercourse.
And what does it mean to the child, will they be taken away from their family or whatever opportunities and support that they have? Maybe the child who's being sexually abused is also getting physically abused at home and their only opportunity to get away from that is staying in this program. It's hard to understand, but it's also very common and understandable when you put all those things into place.
In this particular case, there must have been the shock of seeing this powerful, respected figure engaged in such an act, right? You see things like "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" and they're these monsters, people who rape, murder and abduct strangers. So if the abuser is somebody you care about and respect, there's a cognitive dissonance: "Can they really be doing this monstrous thing when they're not a monster? I just recently wrote a piece called "A Reasoned Approach," which was funded though the Ms.
What we talked about is that because we have moved more and more toward monsterizing the offender, it's actually limiting our ability to prevent child sexual abuse. The more we make sex offenders into monsters, the less likely we are able to see behaviors in people we love that give us concern. My first private assumption upon hearing the details of the timeline was that McQueary was worried about the ramifications reporting would have on him and his future career prospects -- but theoretically it could be that it took him time to understand this shocking image he was seeing?
I think anybody who would walk in and see their hero doing some monstrous act would have a hard time understanding just what was going on.
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