Penn State Sex Scandal

Penn State Sex Scandal

Background of the Scandal

On November 5, 2011, Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for football at Penn State University (PSU), was arrested on charges of abusing eight boys over a 15-year period. This announcement precipitated events leading to the resignation of Tim Curley, the university's athletic director, and Gary Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business, who oversaw campus police, and the firing of long-time, record-winning head coach, Joe Paterno, by Penn State's Board of Trustees. In the days following the announcement, students and members of the Penn State community rioted to protest the firing of Paterno and what some claimed as the unfair media scrutiny that lead to Paterno's dismissal. Although the public's reaction varied, and not all Penn State fans and community members held the same position, as evidenced by the candlelight vigil for the victims held after the riots, I was deeply disturbed at the televised and print mainstream news media coverage that framed this “media event” around the outcomes and implications for Penn State football, including Coach Paterno, and the impact it had on fans of Penn State and the broader Penn State community, rather than the victims of sexual child abuse (Resnick, 2011).

Foucault's concept of discourse, and media framing of who/what is inside and outside the frame to interrogate “silence” as a means by which power and privilege operate in the scandal. I then extend this discussion of silence to engage the critical sport studies critique of the “institutional center of sport” and offer three important considerations that were left outside of the frame in the mainstream news media. These silences rendered invisible an important critique of the contemporary culture of big time athletic programs and the meanings of sport in contemporary American culture. In this way, silence operated to simultaneously reaffirm the institutional center of sport, wherein big time athletic programs reside and violence is normalized.

What was silenced in the news media coverage (and continues to be silenced) was an attempt to situate the PSU scandal/tragedy within a larger cultural context. Rather than a moral or ethical failure of certain individuals to report what they saw, or to act on the knowledge they received, the scandal/tragedy needs to be situated within the larger cultural context whereby the institutional center of sport normalizes both the suppression of empathy of self and others, and violence against oneself and against others. Moreover, “cultures of silence” exist in peer groups in families and in communities that often enable men's violence (Seeger, 2006).

Although Messner was discussing men's sexual violence against women, similar dynamics operate in the cultures of silence regarding men's violence, and specifically sexual violence, against other men. In addition, outside the frame in the news media cover- age was the “win-at-all costs” mentality that pervades big time athletic programs at most universities. It is this value system that allows coaches, athletes, universities, and com- munities to look away when scandals occur. Indeed, just days before, Coach Paterno and ...