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| Image courtesy of pibillwarner.wordpress.com. |
Frank Bruni’s article at the NY Times offers a painful reminder of the vulnerability of young children to sexual predators. Bruni zeroes in on the recent scandal at Penn State University, which he links to similar widespread and prolonged abuse of young boys in the church, Boy Scouts, and other supposedly safe venues.
But if we simultaneously hold in our minds the fact that “1 out of 3 women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or other otherwise abused during her lifetime,” we must face the reality that we can’t take for granted the safety of children of either gender – anywhere.
In the Molester Next Door, Bruni writes:
The longest, most exhaustively researched article I ever wrote for a newspaper or magazine was about a child molester who had sexually abused a little boy living down the street. The abuse went on for more than two years, beginning when the boy was 10.
The arrest on Saturday of a former Penn State University assistant football coach — who is accused of sexually abusing eight pre-adolescent, adolescent and teenage boys — brought this all back to me. I wonder if people who know the coach and saw him working with kids will comment on how genuinely nurturing he seemed and how this surely prevented or discouraged suspicions about him.
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