Most of us have read this article on did any one see this quote? Kind of hard to believe.
- Thread starter RTLH
- Start date
I don't know the family or those involved. I just know what has been reported. And then I read dozens of opinions on here that either purposely or unintentionally misrepresent the reports. Nowhere is there any statement about what the family wanted Penn State to do. Any statements to the contrary are just conjecture by people on this board. The kid himself supposedly just wanted it all to go away. The reports say it was the family who called PSU and it was the family that put the kid on the phone with "Joe and Jim" only after promising the kid that they would not call the police. But the reports never say anything about WHY they called PSU (although I don't find that all that unusual - in that day and age, if a child was wronged by a member of an institution, the parents of said child were much more likely to appeal to the authorities of the institution than they were to call the cops - i..e you have a problem with a priest, you talk to the monsignor, you have a problem with a Little League coach, you talk to the LL administration, you have a problem with a teacher, you complain to the school administration;you just didn't pick up the phone and call the police).
Read the Clemente report. This is an easy answer. In most cases, victims just want it to go away, they do not want the police or the authorities involved. The last thing in the kid's mind would be to get the authorities involved.
I don't know if the reports are true or not. But what I do know is some of the logic that I read on here is out of left field. This is a perfect example of said faulty logic.
When I read some of these threads, I begin to understand why so many people think this board is populated with a bunch of whack jobs.
The story says the kid claimed to be raped by a priest a year earlier. What ever happened to that claim?
Let's say it was your kid. If you believed that he was raped would you call the police? Even if you called JoePa first, how would you react if your kid said JoePa accused him of making up a story?
Wrong. There is a HUGE difference between just being wronged by a member of an institution and being sexually assaulted by one. No "in that day and age" crapola.
If your kid is sexually assaulted, parents call the police. It's a crime, not a misunderstanding.
Wow, some people like UncleLar are delusional..
Stick to writing about hockey, okay Lar?
This is nonsense. Nobody expects a child who is abused to know better but the parents should. You don't contact anybody other than the police when somebody commits a crime against your child. That's how it has always worked.
Why would anyone, including the parents, believe that a college football coach could make all of this go away? And remember, this was 1976. Joe was a head coach for ten years. He hadn't won any national championships. He wasn't a legend of college football. I think people forget that. People attribute WAY too much power to Joe Paterno even in his prime, after he won the championships. The 1976 version of Joe wasn't even that guy. Why are the parents calling the head football coach at PSU to take care of a police matter in 1976? This matter had nothing to do with Joe. I mean, any reasonable person would hear that and question why it makes any sense.
I can't guarantee that none of this, or some of this, is not true. But I certainly question a story that doesn't make sense. And believe me, these things were never handled like you say they were.
Baloney. The only thing you need to do is look at the history of the allegations against Catholic priests. In most cases people went to the church if they had an issue, they did not go to the police. That's clear evidence that things were handled that way back then.
Logic and truth don't matter here, only the mob mentality dispensed by the media and Penn State haters. To the media, if there's no truth to these accusations, then there is no story and stories are their business. As for the victims who made up these stories, they had to tie in Penn State in order to collect the millions. Simply being molested by Sandusky wouldn't necessarily give them access to the university's deep pockets.
It's a historical matter of fact. I'm not making this up. It's how things were handled 50 years ago.
You are not thinking clearly. That answer there does not at all explain why anybody would think that calling JVP was the right thing to do. In this case, he clearly was not "the school."
As to those parents, the many that there were, who went to "the church"....that's on them now, isn't it?
I only know one person molested by a priest. It was about 50 years ago. The kid went to his parents, his parents called the police. The police went to the "church"
And those that DID go to the Catholic church for those issues were WRONG. The police have always handled crimes. Any talk that the police haven't always handled crimes is balogne. If the parents of an abused child are not going to the police, and instead calling head football coaches, then those parents are calling the wrong person. They should have called the police. Expecting a head football coach to solve child abuse accusations is absurd. It's indefensible, actually. You don't call a football coach when somebody abuses your child. If that's the accusation then I have immediate questions and I'm immediately skeptical. There was never a time in the history of this country where football coaches were the ones who were expected to handle these situations. If you want to point at the Catholic Church you can, but not only is it apples and oranges, it's equally as ridiculous to expect the church to solve crime issues as it is a football coach.
The headline for that story should have been: "Two mandated reporters and a school teacher never notified authorities of a rape."
I had to look it up because I wasn't sure when mandated reporting became a law, but it looks like in 1963 there was some sort of legislation that required people to report these things. I don't know what the law looked like in 1976 as far as the details in PA, but I'm assuming you're talking about the child's parents and his teacher?
UncleLar, one of the things that makes me question the statement that the kid was on the phone with Jim(Tarman) and Joe is the fact that conference phoning did not exist at that time, especially in Joe's low tech world.
Just because 99 people out of 100 supposedly go to the police, doesn't mean this kids parents did. The Catholic church stuff somehow stayed under wraps........
I don't think it's a historical matter of fact that a parent would allow their child to be raped by two different people in back to back years without contacting the authorities.
In the old days a kid might get beat up by another kid. The parent might not call the police but instead go to the bully's parents. They might stop there if they believed that the bully's parents were going to address the problem. They would probably call the police if the bully's parents ignored the complaint or if the bully kept beating up the kid.
Rape is a much different matter. Especially if the kid was raped twice. It seems highly unlikely to me that the parents would just let that go twice.
Well beyond that, it was a "Foster Child" and the Foster Parents would have almost certainly been required by CPS Law and Foster Parenting Regulations to report the accusations of Sexual Assault by their Foster Child. Ridiculous to claim that the Foster Parents would have attempted to cover up two separate incidents of child rape upon a Foster Child under their care within a year - unless of course they were itching to be prosecuted and go to jail.
UL, I have a tough time comparing any other person or entity to the Catholic church. Your average parishioner looked at men of the cloth as God-like people. They would have looked at turning in a Priest akin to kicking God in the nuts. Imagine how their peer group, the church members, would have reacted. I wouldn't even rule out death threats.
I'm a child of the 70's and if I would have been molested, you can be damned sure my parents would have gone to the police. I suspect things would have been handled differently back then, people would not have gone to a football coach for anything because back then a football coach had way less power than they do now.
Are you kidding me? Tell that to the Woody Hayes and Bear Bryants of the world. Back then football coaches were gods and had infinitely more power than they do now. It's common knowledge that police often looked the other way when football players got in trouble. You can bet they did the same for coaching staffs (although one would certainly hope that wouldn't extend to child abuse, I suspect that coaches would have been given the benefit of the doubt in most cases).
Don't confuse power with influence. The game today makes way more money and coaches are paid a ton more, thereby giving football in general more power. In the 70's college football didn't carry the kind of clout it does now. Sure, some of the coaches had influence but didn't have any real power.
Semantics. Coaches back then were infinitely more able to bury transgressions by their players or staff. Whether you call that "influence" or "power" is irrelevant.
I agree. They may be making more money today but those coaches wielded a lot more power and controlled things a lot more than they can today with all the social media.
Tarman was assistant AD.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?...AAIBAJ&sjid=wvIFAAAAIBAJ&pg=740,3354485&hl=en
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