Children’s advocate says Penn State should focus on healing victims

With so much attention on sanctions against Penn State University and its football program following the child sex-abuse convictions of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, there’s a danger that the most important aspect of the scandal is being overlooked — the victims.

Mark Parr, executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Center in Hoffman Estates, says the college needs to focus on healing those victims as much as on changing its internal policies to increase the protection of children under its care.

“Obscured in all of this is kids do recover from being abused, if they get some help and the proper support,” Parr said. “But it’s got to be made accessible to the victims in a timely way and I think those were failures as well.”

Sandusky was convicted last month on 45 criminal counts related to the abuse of 10 boys over a 15-year period starting in 1994. An investigation found school officials, including head coach Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer in January, tried to cover up abuse allegations. The university was fined $60 million Monday by college sports’ governing body.

Parr urged that all institutions should have programs for screening and supervision of volunteers and employees who have direct contact with children, and work to create a culture of reporting abuse.

“The idea of any staff member or volunteer having any kind of unlimited access, unsupervised access (to students) — they need to have policies that clearly prohibit that kind of contact,” Parr said. “The kinds of situations that were allowed to go on where (Sandusky) had children staying at his house, taking them to ball games to other parts of the country — it clearly, at very best, compromises everybody’s safety. … That’s what seems so astounding about it.”

Parr said the Sandusky case bears similarities to the sex abuse cases involving Catholic priests that started coming to light in the mid-1980s. That was the last sex-abuse scandal involving institutional negligence of this scale, he said.

“Any of these huge and powerful institutions we’ve seen, whether it’s the Catholic Church or a university, it seems fairly clear there was much more of an investment in maintaining their status and power,” Parr said. “The needs of these young men obviously got pushed to the side.”

Parr said colleges may not be adequately prepared to handle sex abuse against children and young adults.

“Even though colleges have underage kids on campus, whether it’s for music camps, sports camps, I don’t know that up until this scandal got widely reported, people really thought about the responsibility of university staff,” Parr said. “This is an opportunity for programs like ours, crisis programs, to establish and connect with the universities.”