Now that Jerry Sandusky has finally been arrested for raping boys, details of previous investigations are coming to light. As early as 1998, authorities were already aware that he may have been engaging in inappropriate activity with young boys. Just two years later, a janitor saw him assaulting a boy in the Penn State football locker room. In 2002, Mike McQueary, then a grad student, saw him raping a boy in the locker room, and reported the incident to his father, and then Joe Paterno.
Finally, in 2008, a mother reported Sandusky to police after her son admitted that Sandusky had been abusing him. This is what finally led to an investigation.
Obviously, plenty of people knew what was going on. Why didn’t they put a stop to the crimes?
It all comes down to priorities and costs. College football is enormously profitable for schools in terms of both commercial revenue and donations from alumni. For major universities, it has become an essential cash cow, and Sandusky was a central figure in Penn State’s football program.
If the higher-ups at Penn State had thought that Sandusky’s behavior would cost the school more than what his contribution to the football program brought in, they would have forced him out long ago. However, schools do not have the Justice Department breathing down their neck about homosexual misconduct, but rather heterosexual. If Sandusky had been caught raping an adult coed on campus, he would have lost his job immediately. In fact, if he’d so much as said something inappropriate to a female coed he would have been in trouble. But it turns out his victims were just 10-12-year-old boys, who weren’t even students in any event.
Sexual assault on campus is officially tied to explicitly feminist legislation, namely Title IX. Sexual assault is considered, under Title IX, to be “discrimination on the basis of sex.” The implication is that rape on campus is essentially a matter of victimization of women; homosexual rape is not covered under federal anti-discrimination law, which can trigger withdrawal of federal funds and federal lawsuits — a very painful proposition for public universities. Rather, in the Sandusky case, it will be an entirely criminal affair as far as the feds are concerned, although the victims may well be able to sue the school in civil court. For the school, this is unfortunate, but ultimately the state of Pennsylvania will pick up the tab, and federal funding to Penn State will remain uninterrupted. Therefore, from a cost-benefit perspective, rape of boys is a far less serious matter than, say, sexual harassment on campus.
Under federal law and school policy, homosexual rape is not a matter of “discrimination,” and therefore of far less consequence than any discomforts that may be suffered by females on campus. So, the reason Sandusky was allowed to get away with raping boys on campus for years is that the federal government, the major patron of our universities, doesn’t care all that much about rape if the victims are male.
Unfortunately, we may have to conclude that, given the law and incentives, the behavior of higher-ups at Penn State, who ran cover for their boy, was probably rational, and they were, in fact, doing their jobs. We must recognize that we live in a society in which the value assigned to most males is extraordinarily low.
