A message from SNAPDFW’s facilitator, Lisa Kendzior

Acknowledge your courage

Senior Penn State administration leaders, including the President and the head football coach, had “repeatedly concealed facts,” from authorities about the crimes of convicted child rapist, coach Jerry Sandusky. One of the main reasons given was ‘reverence for football.’

So said Louis J. Freech, the former FBI director commissioned by the university to investigate how the convicted pedophile could have gone on raping vulnerable children in his charge for so long.

In a televised news conference in Philadelphia, Freeh said that the most powerful leaders in the university and the program in which Sandusky worked had “repeatedly concealed facts” for years about the sexual nature of accusations against Sandusky and kept them concealed.

Parallels between the university and the Roman Catholic Church, or any religious denomination whose leadership conceals sexual abuse by its people “to protect its corporate brand, image, and market value.” should be obvious.

But as long as its leadership has a reputation for showing a “total and consistent disregard” for the welfare of children, the university will continue to face fallout, saida crisis-communications expert.

But as long as university leadership has a reputation for showing a “total and consistent disregard” for the welfare of children, the university will continue to face fallout, said a crisis-communications expert at TVP Communications.

Church, synagogue, mosque, sangha and other institutional religion cultures would do well to take this report to heart. Will they?

Links:

• Read ‘Penn State’s Culture of Reverence Led to 'Total Disregard’ for Children’s Safety' in The Chronicle of Higher Education of 12 July 2012.

• A Friday editorial in The New York Times says the Freeh Report “shows how slavish devotion to some institutional imperative can trump everything, including the law, basic human decency and the bedrock obligation we all have to protect defenseless children from harm.”

• Read the full Freeh report on the NY Times website …