All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

As Buzz Bissinger said in his opinion piece, the child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State is a prime example of “Buck passing and unconscionable cowardice.”

Joe Paterno, coach there for 46 years has been fired. The president of the university has been fired, and the unfortunate witness to the sexual abuse, McQueary, may also ultimately be fired as well. The perpetrator, Sandusky, has long since retired, and sits comfortably in his home collecting his undeserved pension instead of serving out a prison sentence. The investigator of the 1998 incident that caused the university to ask him to retire in 1999, has “disappeared.” Even after Sandusky was asked to retire, university officials, well aware that the incident in question was not the only one he may have been involved in; continued to allow him to have access to the same facilities where the previous incidents had taken place. Only after it became apparent that he wasn’t going to stop using university facilities for such purposes did they take his keys away.

This is deeper than the all powerful football program at a major university. It is more evil than the aberrant sexual appetite of Sandusky. This is much more pervasive than just that “buck passing,” the university officials engaged in to absolve themselves of guilt and responsibility to that child. Rather than do right by the victim and report the abuse to the proper authorities, simply tell the person at the next level up and forget about it. Don’t ask questions later; don’t ask whatever came of it, don’t ask if anyone ever found out if the kid was ok. As they say in New York, “just forget about it.” It’s more insidious than the minimizing of the victim with each pass of the baton up the chain of command. Unlike the game of “telephone,” where with each retelling of the story, the details become worse than the reality; in this tale, the brutal rape of a child morphs into “maybe he touched the kid inappropriately.” The reality is, even if the “maybe he touched the kid,” had been the true depth of the story, it was still wrong. It was still sexual abuse of a child and needed to be investigated by the proper authorities.  That lack of reporting it is a symptom of something deeper, darker, and more sinister that not one of the officials in question had the courage to do anything about.

That lack of courage is symptomatic of a much deeper issue which has infected every area of our social structure, every aspect of our society: men are simply not required to be responsible for their sexual behaviour; and other men will do everything in their power to keep it that way. From not reporting incidents such as these, to moving priests from parish to parish, irrespective of whether that behaviour falls within the accepted bounds of our cultural norms; men do not face the full weight of the consequences for the things they do sexually. From Joe Walsh, the Congressman, who doesn’t pay his child support, yet receives awards for his supposed preservation of family values to Mr Sandusky who was allowed to prey on young boys for what may turn out to have been his entire career at Penn State, and all manner of men in between; we refuse to force men to “step up.”

Until we do, women and children will continue to suffer. Any society that fails in its protection of women and children is doomed to fail.