Well, everyone's demanding Joe Paterno's head because he called his boss, but not the police, when he received credible information that one of his subordinates had sexually abused a child.
I try to imagine myself in a similar situation. It's actuallyhard to imagine, because the circumstances are so foreign to my everyday experience. It's like asking me to imagine what I'd do if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night. Who knows? I don't have a plan. I guess I'd come up with something on the spot, and I'd hope the something I came up with was the right thing.
Okay, so now I'm imagining that someone has called me at home on a weekend and told me that they witnessed one of my underlings sexually assaulting a child. This is the informational equivalent of plutonium; I've got to handle it with care. Whatever I do from this point forward, lives and reputations are hanging in the balance.
I could call the police, but what if the person who reported the crime to me made a mistake? What if they had some ax to grind against my subordinate? What if the situation is more complicated than it appears? The police can ALWAYS be brought in, say, in a day or two...but bringing them in immediately is a decision that can't be undone.
On the other hand, if there really was a crime committed, the police should be called immediately. Or should they? Is that what the family of the boy would want? Maybe they would want it kept out of the papers. Should I try to contact them first?
I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I've never had to deal with anything like this before, and I'm flying blind.
You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call my boss and let him deal with it. He gets paid to deal with stuff like this, not me. I'll call him and make it his problem. He'll know what to do.
UPDATE: Now that Paterno's actually been fired, there are plenty of calls, too, for the firing of Mike McQueary, the guy who saw Jerry Sandusky sodomizing a 10-year-old in the shower and went to Joe Paterno instead of the police. Let me make a point about McQueary that's similar to the one I made about Paterno: A normal, human reaction to such a situation is to experience shock, distress, confusion, doubt, anger, disgust, fear, and concern. Obviously, not having experienced those things ourselves, and knowing the full details of the story as it ultimately played out, it's easy for us, many years later, to identify the right thing to have done: call the police immediately. Because McQueary and Paterno didn't do that, we condemn them. In the moment, though, I think McQueary's and Paterno's responses, actions, and inactions were understandable.
(Not right, but understandable. I guess I'm just finding the Monday morning quarterbacking pretty distasteful. Paterno, McQueary, et al., aren't victims here, but they are being treated as if they covered up child sexual abuse. They did not.)
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