Unlikely Legacy 0
As a result of the Penn State pederasty case, the past few weeks seems to have produced a rush of persons admitting that they were sexually abused as children.
Many callers mention Penn State and Syracuse and they often seek advice on how to report potential molesters or stop abuse, Marsh said.
“We haven’t seen anything like this before in terms of response on the hotlines,” she said.
Calls to the Childhelp national child sexual abuse hotline are up about 20 percent since charges were filed against Sandusky at the start of November, said Michelle Fingerman, the hotline’s director.
Calls by adults who were victimized as children are up by almost a third, she said.
“We’re just picking up the phone more often, and the calls are longer. They are really more intense,” Fingerman said.
Americans attitudes’ about sex are seriously bent. We are unable to talk about “it,” while at the same time we make celebrities of persons (think Paris Hilton) simply for being able to do “it,” as if no one else ever has or will.
These attitudes help keep victims silent and abet victimizers (and their attorneys), who play on them to keep victims cowed and docile. In a recent column, Monica Yant Kinney described how predators (and their attorneys) use shame to exact silence.
Evil flourishes, not in the locker room showers or in the vestries, but in the silence.
