Terry Mitchell

How Institutional Child Sex Abuse Scandals Can Be Prevented



Posted: Tuesday, November 15, 2011

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

In the wake of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, everyone seems to be preoccupied with pointing the finger of blame at those who failed to report what they knew about it. While I believe some of us may be waxing a bit too judgmental of certain people, it is quite worthwhile to identify what could and should have been done to stop the abuse. However, it is even more important to try to figure out how to stop scandals like these from ever getting started in future. Like the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

A key element of this prevention will be to make sure we keep children out of places where there is little or no desire or ability on the part of adults to protect them. Children should never have been allowed to stay on the campus of a place like Penn State without being under the supervision of a parent or legal guardian. There was just no good reason to have them there. Someone should have used a simple two-word when Jerry Sandusky tried to bring children onto the campus under the guise of charitable work. That word should have been an emphatic “no.”

Other than homes, there are places and institutions that are natural habitats for children: nurseries, daycare centers, schools, playgrounds, orphanages, children’s hospital wards, etc. At places like that, accommodations have been made and rules have been written specifically for the safety, protection, and welfare of children.  However, a college campus is not one of them. Neither is an office, plant, adult dormitory, or any other institution where children are in the minority and are not the primary focus of its existence.

Children are virtually invisible at these institutions, and are therefore more vulnerable to be abused by opportunistic, noncustodial adults. And even when other adults witness or hear about the abuse, they often go into denial. Such was the case at Penn State, where seeing and/or hearing wasn’t necessarily believing. In the future, we must make every effort possible to keep them from being (ware)housed at such places. Let’s not wait for abuse to start and then worry about how to deal with it. Let’s not give it a chance to begin.

No child should ever have to endure sexual abuse at an institution where he or she should never have been in the first place. No adult should ever have to worry about having a lifetime of achievements tarnished by taking the fall for the actions of some pervert. No institution should ever have to have to suffer the degradation, humiliation, and potential financial devastation of a Penn State-style child sex scandal.
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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