“Who’s Joe Pa? and who’s Sandusky?”
Those were the main two questions floating in my head when the Penn State news broke. At the time, I didnt care for NCAA football. So while it was a big deal that a coach was molesting his players – children – for decades, I didn’t know who the hell he was (which made it a bigGER deal.) Ran a wiki on him, and I had questions.
– Why?
– How did he get away with this for so long?
– How do you convince someone you’re not a child molester ?
Child molesters come in all forms. As a player, you don’t think “I hope my coach doesn’t touch me at some point.” He broke a sacred code. And the fact that he looks like he could be the Pope made it more damning. Or weird.
The most surprising part was hearing Sandusky try to describe what he doing to the players as anything but sexual. Like he couldn’t find the right word for it, but ‘sexual’ didn’t fit the bill.
Stories like become personal to people, and their back stories to come out. Abuse against children are prevalent, but aren’t spoken on.