By Tim Brown

Our Nation has now been watching the Sandusky drama play out since November of 2011 when the story first broke. From the very beginning, the news media disclosed that the victims were mostly fatherless. Fur-· thermore, we learned that Sandusky’s “charity” was probably a tool to target new victims and that the “charity” was a sort of substitute or replacement for the absent fathers.

As this drama has unfolded, it seems the public is fixated upon why Mike McQuery did not kick Sandusky’s tail when he witnessed Sandusky and a victim in the shower. We are also speculating on why this could go on so long, with numerous victims and nobody stepping in to stop it. Also the report issued by former FBI director Louis Freeh makes it very clear that many of the victims could have been spared their abuse had Penn State Officials done more early on.

The presence of a father

On Father’s Day of 2012, a few articles were penned which pointed out that the presence of a father protects children from predators like Sandusky, and the absence of a father makes children vulnerable. The articles were good; however, the elephant in the room regarding the Sandusky case is why the victim’s fathers are absent in the first place. Nobody in the media is asking this question and nobody in the media is investigating this. The way this story is being reported, one would assume that the victim’s fathers were abducted by aliens in the middle of the night and whisked away to some far off galaxy without anyone asking questions.

So I will stand up and ask, “Where were the victim’s fathers and why were they absent?” If the Father of victim number 1 abandoned his family for a new trophy wife and moved to a far away state, I think we could all agree that he deserves blame and shame for what later happened to his son at the hands of a predator.

However, what if the Father of victim number I did not walk out on his child, but instead was forced away from his child in divorce court? In fact, what if the Father of victim number 1 did not even want the divorce to begin with, and what if he paid tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees, custody evaluator fees, counselor fees as ordered by ajudge, while he made a desperate attempt to stay connected to his child … Only to be left penniless, broken and betrayed by a branch of the government we refer to as “family” law.

What if…?

We are quick to blame absent fathers for the subsequent ills that befall their children. Most of us have heard the all too familiar advertising campaigns suggesting that Fathers should take the time to be a Father today.

We all agree that father involvement is good for children … as long as the other parent is okay with the Father being involved. However, as soon as the other parent wants otherwise, everybody looks the other way.

A question that I often ask of religious and other supposedly pro-family audiences is “What defines a good father when the other parent wants a frivolous divorce?” What does the reader believe defines a good father when the other parent wishes for the father to be absent? I will go on to ask the reader, is it possible that many of Sandusky’s victims have fathers that love their sons, but were forcibly separated from their sons in our nation’s secretive family court system, merely because that is what the other parent wanted?

Perhaps I should stop beating around the bush and just say it. Dare we stick a microphone in the face of the divorce court judge and ask him why he forced the father away from his children? Dare we ask the judge if he feels a sense of responsibility or even remorse for the Sandusky victims, and the fatherless children across the country who go to bed every night without a father in the home, simply because the other parent petitioned to have the father removed?

Is there justification?

A common justification from the other parents for the Father’s forced absence is the badness of the man himself, as judged by the other parent. However, if we look at the sheer number of absent Fathers today, making a claim that all of these men are somehow bad is no more prejudiced and bigoted than what took place in the old American south, or in pre WWII Germany. With nearly forty percent of our nation’s children living in fatherless homes, do we really buy into the argument that these children are fatherless because their father is so bad that he deserved to be expelled from the family? Furthermore, do we buy into the statement from the divorce court judge that the father has been expelled, “in the best interest of the children”? Please.

The divorce court is a court without a Jury and without due process. It has become a simple matter of routine to forcibly remove a parent, almost always the father, simply because the other parent wants it. There has been plenty of macho bar stool conversation about what someone else would have done to Sandusky had they walked in on him in the Locker Room and discovered him with a boy. And of course, Sandusky deserves every bit of it. But who made those victim boys vulnerable and fatherless in the first place?

Tim Brown is President of Illinois Fathers