Just when you thought people couldn’t be any worse…
This is madness:
Officials at Central Mountain High School in Clinton County weren’t providing guidance for fellow students, who were reacting badly about Joe Paterno’s firing and blaming the 17-year-old, said Mike Gillum, the psychologist helping his family. Those officials were unavailable for comment this weekend.
The name-calling and verbal threats were just too much, he said.
Other alleged victims are turning to each other for support, since they fear others will out them and cause a media swarm. The only encouragement for Victim One, Gillum said, is watching other alleged victims come forward because they felt empowered by his courage.
“He feels good about that,” Gillum said. “That’s the one good that’s come of all this.”
Where the hell are the high school administrators on this?! It is their responsibility to protect students like Victim 1, especially at a time when they had to know that tensions would be running high. It is also their responsibility to explain to these nitwit bullies that Victim 1 should be commended for coming forward and empowering other victims to come forward.
This fealty to the almighty Paterno is more than I can stand. What is wrong with people?
I’m disgusted and I thought I’d already reached the bottom of my Well of Disgust.
[via Ace of Spades; image via Angry Little Girls]
[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]
biff diggerence
I’m sure the whole matter will be resolved thoroughly, now.
After all, Louis (Opus Dei) Freeh knows all about protecting Roman Catholic authority figger pederasts for decades.
“I don’t have a computer, either.”
Absolute joke.
Comrade Dread
When you invest yourself and see yourself in your heroes and make the institution a part of your core identity, you become extremely defensive and aggressive against people who challenge them and show you their sins. The worse the sin exposed, the worse the reaction to the ‘attack’ on the tribe and your identity.
losgatosca
We’re clearly not as evolved as we think we are.
Bully the victim because their problems aren’t enough already and now football, that’s why.
scav
Paterno über Alles. Rah Rah! I never caught football, I’ve no clue either.
soonergrunt
Bring on the meteor. Seriously. It’s time to let the cockroaches have their turn. They can hardly fuck it up any worse.
BGinCHI
This is great news for David Brooks.
Joseph Nobles
Oh, Jesus. Between this and Limbaugh calling the NASCAR booing of Michelle Obama a “recognition of uppity-ness”, I’m really tired of the human race today.
srv
Who ‘outed’ these kids identities?
But I’m sure this is all really Marilyn Manson’s fault, and if we just had more real men like Joe Paterno.
West of the Cascades
Also, it’s not as if the high school couldn’t see this coming … the assistant principle at the school was apparently the first administrator to actually make the appropriate report to Child Welfare after Victim 1’s mother reported his allegations regarding sexual abuse to the school. Sometime in 2009.
Damn them for doing the right thing in getting this investigation started, but then dropping the ball on protecting this victim. No one involved in any part of this sordid case seems to have any ability to follow through or think about the human consequences of their actions (or inactions).
Judas Escargot
Advancing their careers, covering their asses, and lobbying for alumni donations… just like their university counterparts, maybe?
(Just a guess).
trollhattan
@srv:
A seriously good question. Rape-victim and juvenile-victim–hell, even juvenile criminal identities are kept sealed.
Small-town values at work?
bin Lurkin'
I have trouble imagining anyone being even slightly surprised by this, we’ve already seen a full scale riot (2 news vans flipped) over it..
My person opinion is that the current governor is also in this up to his eyebrows as far as the coverup goes and I’ll be completely unsurprised if it turns out there was a large network of wealthy and influential pedophiles grazing the available fresh young booty at the Second Mile.
Scott
When is Caz coming over to sneer that the kid deserves it for whining about a little good-natured football shenanigans?
4tehlulz
OT, but HAHA
‘Homeless Halloween’ Firm Goes Under
Social Outcast
Apparently going to high school in Western PA means never complaining when someone rapes you in the ass. It’s all part of the normal character building process that turns kids into good, God-fearing republicans.
Nutella
All the stories about Sandusky taking kids to games and taking them out of class for personal ‘coaching’ sessions mean that the other students have a pretty good idea of who was involved. All they have to do to figure out which one reported was watch to see who’s meeting with lawyers. In a small town it’s very hard to hide anything.
gelfling545
@Judas Escargot: Quite likely, actually.
Suffern ACE
@trollhattan: I believe that they had the names of the boy’s school principal and a wrestling coach at the school in the report. It would not have been too hard to figure out who in your class was “hanging out with Sandusky”. Also, his morther gave a widely circulated interview.
Brian S
I expect high school kids to act like fucking morons because that’s what they are. I’m more surprised when they don’t act that way. That’s why good teachers and administrators are so damn important. They’re supposed to try to help turn those self-centered egomaniacs known as teenagers into critically thinking members of society. It’s a wonder they succeed as often as they do, given how tough the job is, but it really sucks when they make matters worse like they seem to have done here.
Calming Influence
I understand now why school sports are so popular; they really reinforce that “either your with us, or your against us” clique mentality. It’s so American!
harlana
once again, authority figures have utterly failed this innocent young man (victim)
tamied
@Social Outcast: That’s Central PA, not Western.
David in NY
@Calming Influence: If the “education reform” movement were serious, and not just shills for the privatizers, they’d start a movement to make actual schooling more important than football. Until that happens, we’re nowhere.
cervantes
This isn’t just about Joe Paterno worship. The psychology is more basic. First of all, people who are already perceived as victims often attract more victimization. It has to do with projection — wanting to punish or exterminate the part of yourself that feels victimized — and with perceived vulnerability.
Also, sexual assault victims are generally stigmatized – they have been polluted, somehow it’s their own fault, they have been made into something contemptible. That’s the main reason why people don’t come forward and why the default is to protect their identities.
Finally, if the kid had sex with a man he must be gay, right? Again, homophobes are mostly projecting but this is another specific thing that’s going on.
This sort of thing can happen to sexual assault victims, especially in high school, with or without the Paterno factor.
Mnemosyne
IIRC, the high school administrators asked this young man’s mother if she really, really wanted to report the abuse and that she should really think about it before she made the report. Given their extremely poor follow-up here, I have to stick by my first assumption and think that they said all of that to her as a threat.
(Some people thought maybe it was just a rational warning to her of the kind of shitstorm that was going to erupt, but it’s harder to defend that theory now.)
Xecky Gilchrist
Bullying in Defense of Child Molestation is on the same team with Treason in Defense of Slavery, morally speaking, innit?
MikeJ
@Mnemosyne: I think it’s easier to defend that theory now.
Emma
@bin Lurkin’: My person opinion is that the current governor is also in this up to his eyebrows as far as the coverup goes. Actually it’s my understanding that the current governor launched the investigation when he was DA and, as ex officio member of the PSU board of trustees, “leaned” on them to do the right thing.
jafg
ABL continues to run around with her 1000x magnifying glass making tiny grains of sand look like giant boulders.
Guess it’s a slow day on the whitey tryin to keep the black man down news front.
Gotta get that quota in so you can get your share of BJ coffee mug and hat sales eh?
geg6
Social Outcast @15:
Take a geography class, dude. There’s a reason State College is in Centre County and was chosen, in the 1860s, to be the place of PA’s land grant university and it’s not because it’s in Western PA (which is, actually, over three hours away).
That said, these kids aren’t attending schools in the State College School District, which is excellent and, I’m sure, has many social services available to their students. They are attending schools in the rural, poor areas surrounding State College, a part of the state that those of us in the western and eastern parts of the state call Pennsylbama. It’s Klan country, Focus on the Family country. My guess is that the kids doing the bullying couldn’t care less about Joe Paterno, but are happy to torture a kid who may have been infected by The Ghey. But you’d only know this if you are from PA because the media certainly wouldn’t dig deep enough to find it out when it’s easier to blame Paterno (who I will never defend) and Penn State and keep the media Wurlitzer wailing. What would Armin Kateyan do to get face time on the evening news if the story didn’t fit his narrative?
gwangung
@jafg: WTF????
Emma
@Brian S: I remember a line from a police TV show, maybe Criminal Minds? “Teenagers profile as psychopaths.” If my high school experiences were any guide, they’re right on the money.
Mnemosyne
@MikeJ:
Which theory, that the school was being nice and trying to warn her? Or the theory that they were trying to pressure her not to report?
(I realize my original parenthetical was not very clear.)
MikeJ
@Mnemosyne: I think they were trying to warn her that exactly this would happen. I have no reason to think a high school how ever far away would want to threaten a child. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, I just see no reason to think it.
scav
@Mnemosyne: If this bullying is what they were warning her about, I think they would have been explicit to drive the point home. Only certain topics need to be unvoiced.
Mnemosyne
@MikeJ:
Seriously? The mom is getting ready to report that her son was abused by Sandusky on the grounds of the high school and you don’t think that the high school’s first reaction would be to try to cover their asses and pressure her not to report the abuse?
If so, they would be the very first institution in this story that was more interested in the victims than in protecting their own asses. Given their unwillingness to protect the victim from bullying once the story got out, I think my theory is much more valid.
geg6
Emma @27:
Then your understanding would not be correct.
Our dickhead governor started this grand jury investigation because, despite having witnesses, evidence and victims willing to press charges so he could drag it out over the last two and a half years. He also, just a few months ago, approved a huge state grant for Second Mile, knowing exactly how involved that organization was in these crimes. He only “postponed” the grant the other day when the press found out about it. He was freaking out when this broke and I have it on good authority that it was the president of USSteel who wrangled the Board of Trustees to do the right thing.
Ruckus
@gwangung:
This is a ABL stalker, shows up on most of her posts, maybe best to ignore
Social Outcast
@geg6: Internet geographic pedantry. Wonderful.
Emma
@geg6: I stand corrected. The news, however, have not reported such. The one article I read commented how, once he had become governor, he had to pull away from the investigation and how much heartburn it caused him.
gwangung
@Ruckus: Gotcha.
bin Lurkin'
@Emma: Needless to say, there is news and then there is n00z, I had a personal interest in the case and dug a little deeper than many have.
Indeed, I believe I was the first to post here on BJ that the judge who released Sandusky on his own recognizance did volunteer work for the Second Mile. There is another relationship between those two individuals which has slipped my mind at the moment also too.
karen marie
@bin Lurkin’: Speaking of which — I don’t remember hearing about anyone being pepper sprayed or hit with billy clubs at that little fandango.
geg6
Emma @39:
The only benefit of being so close to the story (both personally and geographically) is that our local media and the Daily Collegian have been doing a bangip job of connecting the dots and, basically, covering this as you wish the national media would cover, well, anything.
karen marie
@gwangung: Pie!
Samnell
I don’t want to minimize this in the slightest, but most kids being bullied get next to nothing from school administrators. They know it. The bullies know it. They’re far more likely to be told to their faces that they brought the trouble on themselves by being whatever some bully doesn’t like than to have the real problems addressed.
It doesn’t help that one of the major recruiting pools for teachers and administrators are the socially successful, popular kids from back in the day for whom all of this stuff is just invisible.
bin Lurkin'
@Samnell:
Same as it ever was, I recall getting suspended from school when someone shoved my head in a toilet.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Joseph Nobles:
What a dick. That guy really does need to just curl up into a little balle and die. Well, maybe into a big fat ball. Anyway, it’s the curling up and dying part that’s the point. Ah, if only this were true… Between that and the bullying htat poor kid in Pennsylvania, I feel like giving up.
Howlin Wolfe
@jafg: Did you write that with your Klan hood on or off?
Dr. Squid
@gwangung:
Shorter jafg:
Ignore me. I like child abuse.
gnomedad
We are living in strange times. Kudos for giving credit, ABL.
Gex
Their religion (football) commands them to bully others.
Chris
@geg6:
I’m not from PA, but I’ve got several close friends from there, in the cities though (Philly, Pittsburgh and Erie). Is “Pennsylbama” the same as “Pennsyltucky”? Just wondering.
Samnell
@bin Lurkin’:
I knew the score in school. They told us outright in junior high that anybody getting into a fight could expect the same punishment, no matter what the circumstances. I’m not a violent person to begin with and I’m a pacifist now, but that’s practically an engraved invitation for the kids with little to lose to unleash themselves on the kids who have a lot to lose by missing some days of school. That, “I didn’t see it”, “Stop letting them bother you”, “just ignore it”, the list goes on and on.
It’s a wonder the suicide rate for the bullied isn’t 100%.
PatrickG
@Chris: The almighty Wikipedia entry for Pennsylbama redirects you to the entry for Pennsyltucky, so I’d guess yes. :)
muddy
You don’t need shitty teenagers for this b.s. When I reported an assault at school by a gang of boys to the principal I was punished by my mother because “now those boys will have a black mark on their record”. It got much worse from there once the rules of engagement were made clear at home.
That kid is at least lucky to have a mother on his side. I’m glad for him he does, it really can make the biggest difference of all.
rikyrah
I usually try and get you away from I Hate People.
but, today, I’m sitting right beside you, ABL
Eric U.
as a State College native for the last 15+ years, I had to look up where that high school is. It’s a rural area about an hours drive from State College. I have been wondering if State College was off-limits to Sandusky or not, or if he just thought that victims would be easier to find/hide out in the sticks.
I’m not going to say that State College is a haven for gay high schoolers, but my understanding is there is a fairly large gay community at the high school. OTOH, the rednecks in the local area have been known to come to State College to find and beat up gays and people of color. Central PA really deserves the “Pensyltucky” name.
low-tech cyclist
Sounds like this is par for the course for that particular high school:
low-tech cyclist
Having missed the edit window, I’ll add the obvious: that the school officials don’t even have the excuse of being caught unawares. They already knew before the story broke that Victim One was a student at their high school.
They should have been thinking about the possibility of harassment from the get-go; they just seem to have been predisposed to not give a shit about the kid.
Bill Wolfe
why did you use the word “snitching” in your headline?
That only reinforces the hated and ignorance.
Take that word down, NOW!