
{"id":21948,"date":"2011-11-17T12:35:06","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T17:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=21948"},"modified":"2011-11-17T12:35:06","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T17:35:06","slug":"never-look-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2011\/11\/17\/never-look-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Never look away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Vicky Dickson<\/strong><br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What was that last word?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Arse,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I whispered. Since he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d invited me to the performance of <em>My Fair Lady<\/em>, I knew I had to be polite to him. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d also been told not to talk during the show, and definitely not to repeat such words. So when he asked again, I resorted to lying: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear it either.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n<p>I think I assumed that, being an old man, his hearing was just bad. But it did seem strange that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153arse\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was the only word in the show that he apparently didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear.<\/p>\n<p>It seemed stranger still when, some time later, he invited my friend and me to his bedroom. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been sent to his house to return copies of The New Yorker that my mother had borrowed, and after his housekeeper had let us in he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d yelled down the stairs to ask if we minded him not being \u00e2\u20ac\u0153formally dressed.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I remember thinking that meant he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a tie on. Turns out, it meant he was naked, except for a skinny towel draped around his middle, and wanted us to come upstairs and help him with his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153exercises.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say exactly what those \u00e2\u20ac\u0153exercises\u00e2\u20ac\u009d consisted of, because I cowered in a corner while they were going on. But I do remember that he stretched out on his bed and asked my friend to rub his leg. I remember how uncomfortable it made me to hear him telling her \u00e2\u20ac\u0153higher, higher.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look in their direction, because I really didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to know what was happening. And later, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell my parents or anybody else about that afternoon at his house.<\/p>\n<p>Given that I was a na\u00c3\u00afve 10-year-old at the time, perhaps my silence was understandable. It was a silence with consequences though: Five years later, my then-10-year-old sister had a similar encounter with that same neighbor, in which she was persuaded to rub his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153leg.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The incident upset her so much that she did tell my parents. <\/p>\n<p>As a parent of daughters myself now, what happened next continues to surprise me. My mother apparently asked my dad to confront the neighbor, and his response to her was, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do that. It might give him a heart attack.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d His doctor, who was also our family doctor, reputedly also refused to confront the man. As far as I know, nobody went to the police or otherwise tried to prevent the man from abusing more children. <\/p>\n<p>My neighbor was a highly regarded and well-loved professor at UNC, so maybe they all thought his word would carry more weight than that of a couple of young girls. Maybe they thought they were protecting our family from the huge embarrassment of a court case. It all happened decades ago, before anybody really talked about child molestation, so maybe they just didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to do. I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know; there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no one left to ask.<\/p>\n<p>But what I do know is how easy it is to turn away, to say nothing. Years later, my dad told me another story, of the time his boss had begun to suspect a colleague of bringing young boys, after hours, to the dormitory attached to their office. His boss\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 solution, according to my dad, was to change the locks on the dormitory doors without telling the colleague.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s possible that the details of that story are inaccurate, since my dad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s memory was starting to go at the time he told it. The way he told it, though, was striking, since his boss and he were both publicly acclaimed, highly skilled lawyers, and neither seemed to appreciate the moral issues at play. The point simply seemed to be to protect the reputation of the institution that employed them both \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to get the children off the campus.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m bringing up these stories now because I think the Penn State student protestors, and all those who sympathize with their point of view, need to understand why their beloved football coach had to go. Paterno had the power, and the moral obligation, to insist on a full investigation of the 2002 shower incident involving his former colleague, but he chose not to invoke that power. He chose, like my parents \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and like me \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to look away. And because he looked away, the alleged molestations continued.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s vital that institutions like Penn State make it crystal clear to all their employees that ignoring a suspicious situation involving a child simply will not be tolerated. Otherwise, such institutions send the message that preserving reputations is more important than protecting children \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and child molesters will take note. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What was that last word?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Arse,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I whispered. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21949,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21948\/revisions\/21949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}