Sandusky is not alone in abusing adopted children

Lorraine

"Adoption, that's an opportunity to enrich your own life and hopefully enrich the life of another. It's been a very positive experience for us. A kid is a kid. Sometimes it's easier to deal with kids who don't have your own genes."--Jerry Sandusky (NO RELATION!) in a 2001 story in the Philadelphia Daily News. The occasion was the publication of Sandusky's book, Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story, and sport columnist Stan Hochman was writing a "positive piece about a guy helping disadvantaged kids." The story continues:

"Jerry  and Dottie Sandusky adopted six kids of their own, [emphasis added] while helping thousands of others through The Second Mile, a charitable foundation he organized." As we know today, Sandusky is the Penn State assistant football coach accused of multiple counts of sexually abusing young boys over a 15 year period, and that university officials covered up the scandal for years.


The latest rumor: that Sandusky was pimping young boys to rich donors to the athletic program at Penn State. 

What has outraged me the most about this sickening story is that Mike McQueary, the assistant coach who saw Sandusky allegedly raping an 10-year-old boy in the shower, did nothing about it at the time. He was 28 at the time. He was not a kid. He was a big strong guy, a former football player. He could have pulled Sandusky off the boy. He could have made a lot of noise to indicate he was there. He could have called the police at that moment. He could have stopped the abuse--news reports indicate there is at least one more boy abused after this incident--but he basically let down the boy, and the others who almost assuredly came after him. I say "alleged" but McQueary has sworn that he saw Sandusky performing anal sex on a boy. No one at the university alerted the police, or pursued the matter to determine the well-being of the child involved. In fact, the identity of that child remains unknown. Penn State was so intent on protecting it's reputation and its football program, that a nameless 10-year-old was sacrificed. A throw-away kid.

WHEN DOING NOTHING IS A CRIME
Instead of doing something that took some guts, McQueary told his father that evening about the rape. The next day he told Joe Paterno, the revered head coach at Penn State. Instead of calling the police, JoePa, as he was affectionately known at Penn State, directed McQueary to the school's athletic director and the finance director, who was quite directly in charge of the school's athletic program. Neither called the police. Instead, Sandusky was barred from bringing children on the university campus. Are you kidding me? Someone sees a child rape in progress and does nothing except pass the responsibility up the ladder, and then everyone does more of nothing? Years passed.

Was this the first time a red flag was raised about Sandusky? No. In 1998 local law enforcement authorities investigated charges that he had engaged in inappropriate acts and perhaps sexual activity with a boy in the football facility's showers. Though a janitor said that he had seen Sandusky in the shower with a boy, even after Sandusky “made admissions about inappropriate contact in the shower room” in to the Penn State campus police, nothing happened. In the end, no prosecution; child welfare agencies did nothing; Penn State did nothing. Neither did the people in charge at the charity for troubled youth that Sandusky founded and was intimately involved in.

According to prosecutors, Sandusky preyed on young boys he met through the charity he founded years earlier, Second Mile, which was designed to help disadvantaged boys. The charity released a statement Monday that said the organization’s chief executive was told of McQueary's charge, but an internal investigation found no wrongdoing. “At no time was the Second Mile made aware of the very serious allegations contained in the grand jury report,” the statement said. Now wait a moment--the chief executive hears that a grad student (McQueary) has sworn that he has seen Sandusky raping a boy in the shower; and an internal investigation finds no wrong doing? One can only assume that the "investigation" consisted of asking Sandusky if he had raped anyone--surely they used gentler language--and he denied it, and the boy? What boy? How many of these kids were adopted or in foster care? I'd put money on quite a few.

Not all the kids involved were adopted. The mother of one of the boys who had a lot of sleep-overs at the Sanduskys gave an interview at Good Morning America and she appears to be the boy's first and only mother. But given that the Sanduskys adopted six, that he started a charity for at-risk boys, a lot of the boys were surely adopted or foster kids. Just the other day we wrote about the adopted children who died at the hands of evangelicals following the tenet to not spare the rod. Adopted kids and foster care kids are at high risk for sexual abuse, a fact that is conveniently overlooked by social workers who facilitate adoptions, and the whole adoption industry. Yet news reports are full of cases of the sexual abuse of adopted children, usually by their adopters. Numerous studies have documented the high rate of sexual abuse of foster children, up to four times higher than the rate of children in the general population.*

PEDOPHILE IN ADOPTION
Then there's this: "Family values" presidential candidate Rick Santorum nominated Sandusky for a “Congressional Angels in Adoption Award” the same year that a Penn State graduate assistant spotted Sandusky allegedly performing a sex act with a young boy in a shower at the university’s athletic complex. “Its philosophy is simple: It is easier to develop a child than to rehabilitate an adult,” read the citation from Santorum in an awards dinner program dated Sept. 24, 2002. Santorum was a senator from Pennsylvania at the time.(The award has since been rescinded. Like that makes a difference.)

That may be the only true thing in the laudatory words in the citation directed at Sandusky.

While heads have rolled--finally--at Penn State, it is a case of too little too late. People lost jobs: Paterno; the university president, Graham Spanier; the athletic director, Tim Curley, and former finance official Gary Schultz. The last two were charged with failing to report an incident. As I write, McQueary had received death threats and will not be at the game this weekend.

As a personal note, as testimony of one, my daughter who was adopted was sexually abused by her adoptive grandmother's live-in companion. For years she told no one, not even the therapist her adoptive parents sent her to because Ed told her not to. He told her that her parents would not believe her, and  that her grandmother would not love her, which was hardly an issue, according to my daughter. She finally told everyone years later when she was a senior in high school, but it was too late to inform the police, and there was no corroborating evidence. Her adoptive parents had a hard time believing her, yet she exhibited many of the problems associated with someone who has been abused as a child. The trouble with this scenario is that making up sexual lies often is associated with children who have been sexually abused, putting all of us in a double bind.

Do I believe it happened? Yes, a thousand times yes.--lorraine
_______________________
Read the Philly.com story quote Sandusky:  Judge this book by its cover

See also:  Adopted children killed by their parents as they "train" them

*"Children sexually Abused in foster/adoptive/homes" documenting some of the many cases of sexual abuse of adopted children reported in the media.
"Foster Care vs Family Preservation: The Track Record on Safety and Well-Being," National Coalition for  Child Protection Reform, summarizing numerous studies finding that the rate of sexual and physical abuse is substantially higher for children in foster care than children left in their own homes.