Not Ashamed

I have been having a hard time with this Penn State thing.

It's not simply that my mom went there. Or that my uncle did. Or that they've always been my college football team - even when I went to a different college.* Although all that certainly makes it more painful.

I keep thinking about all those men who knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Sandusky was a sexual predator, and did nothing. How on earth have they lived with themselves for all these years? How did it not destroy them?

When I was a little girl, my next door neighbor - 3 years older and brother of my friend- molested me. I didn't tell anyone, I didn't really have words for what he had done. The year before he attacked me, I had seen him molest his sister. Several of us from the neighborhood had been playing at their house. Another girl and I opened a closet to find the brother molesting the sister. She did not even acknowledge that we'd opened the door, nor did he. I was so confused. We never talked about it. The girl and I had shut the door and run downstairs.

That has haunted me my whole life. The shame grew worse when I became a teacher, still worse when I became a parent.  He was a scary kid and bigger than I was, but I didn't even try. It has haunted me that by not saying something that day, or after he molested me, that I allowed him to do it to others. Even though I did my best to make sure he was never alone with the younger kids in the neighborhood, even though I kicked him regularly enough that he never came near me again, I knew that didn't mean he hadn't had the opportunity at other times, with other kids.   When I worked on forgiveness, I became haunted all over again. For a 12 year old to be doing that - what kind of hell had he been through? What had happened to him? If I had spoken up, would he have gotten help?

When the Penn State scandal first broke, I tried not to get angry. I did not want to be angry at anyone except Sandusky. And while he is the true villain here, of course, he was enabled. He was enabled by those in power at Penn State who did not stop him, who did not report him regularly and loudly to police not affiliated with the university, who did not get him help, who let him continue to work with young boys. They had so much more power than I'd had at 9, yet instead of kicking Sandusky in the shins and keeping him away from younger kids, they did the minimum amount they could get away with.

In getting angry at them, I had to face how ashamed I was of myself. And in writing about it and thinking about it and talking about it, my shame has evaporated. I was a little girl who didn't even have words for what was going on. I did my best.

I doubt the men of Penn State can say the same.

What I want, more than anything, is for a national conversation to come out of this. I want more resources for sexual abuse survivors. I want Proud To Be a Penn Stater to exceed its fundraising goal of $500,000 for RAINN. I want only predators and the adults who enable them to feel shame. I want us to celebrate survivors and for the country to mobilize like we have for breast cancer.



*Boston University eliminated their not so great football program in the '90's. We have a kickass hockey team, though.