Counselors hope Penn State case prompts changes
Jul 23, 2012, 2:00 PM | Updated: Jul 24, 2012, 5:55 am
Penn State University will have to pay $60 million for the sins of its former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky. Local treatment experts wonder if the money dedicated to help victims of abuse will do any good.
The financial penalty is among the sanctions imposed Monday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA requires that the money, starting with $12 million in 2012, go into a fund for programs to detect, treat and prevent child abuse.
This is great news to Lucy Berliner, longtime director of the Harborview Hospital’s Center for Sexual Assault.
“They’re requiring an affirmative effort to help victims or to help prevent victimization and requiring the university to contribute to that and I think that’s a very fitting consequence,” she said.
The NCAA also reduced the number of football scholarships available to Penn State and banned the team from post-season play for four years, along with the forfeit of football games dating back to 1998. The sanctions follow the conviction of Sandusky on charges of sexually abusing ten boys over 15 years.
Gregg Jantz, the founder of the Center, a counseling program in Edmonds, considers the financial sanction of $60 million significant. “The amount of money makes a statement that we’re serious and that help is available. Those zeros stand out.”
It’s significant, agreed Berliner. “$60 million is a lot of money in a field like prevention of child abuse or help for child victims so it’s not insubstantial, at all,” she said.
An investigation found that former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and several other top officials at the university kept quiet about the accusations against Sandusky.
In whatever way the money is spent, Berliner hopes the case leads to specific changes in procedures that require the reporting of crimes against children.
“The only thing we’ve got in front of us right now is to take advantage of it and I would hope that every university athletic department is putting some effort into thinking of procedures, strategies, awareness, what they could be doing so that they’re not the next Penn State,” said Berliner.
Jantz wants the money spent on treatment. He says raising awareness of the problem of child sexual abuse is not enough.
“The problem has been that even with our awareness and [making this] more visible, it hasn’t lowered the sexual abuse statistics,” pointed out Jantz. Recent statistics from the FBI show that almost one out of three girls are victims of some type of sexual abuse by their 18th birthday.
