A jury has convicted ex-Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on 45 counts of what everybody is calling "child sex abuse." He will be sentenced for his crimes sometime within the next 90 days, but it seems likely that Sandusky, now 67 years old, will spend the rest of his life in prison. Is this justice?
That depends on who you ask. For some, I'm sure a justice scenario for Sandusky would include horrors replete with repeated rape episodes in prison and end, ideally, in a slow but sure and excruciatingly painful death he'd have hours or days or even weeks or months to pray for before it came. But, would that be justice?
Not if the concept of justice includes anything about equivalency, because no matter what happens to Jerry Sandusky between now and the end of his life, he will experience it as an adult. His victims were children, children violated in the most personal of ways by an adult charged with their well being. It is not possible that Sandusky will experience the same feelings of helplessness and hopelessness those children experienced when he assaulted them.
Nor will he get to experience the psychological devastation of a child's ability to trust or even to know who to trust being irrevocably shattered because the person who was supposed to protect him was the same person who hurt him. He will not likely live long enough to endure decades of horrific flashbacks and nightmares as his victims have, experiences his victims will still wake from in terror while the state shelters and feeds him.
Sandusky will also likely be spared the agony his young victims experience in years of therapy in which they attempt to save themselves by trying to figure out how what happened to them was their fault. Is that twisted? Yes, it is. Because that's what Sandusky did. He twisted and distorted all reality and sense of well being and security for each of his victims for the rest of their own natural lives.
No, there will be no justice here.
Damn the media and everybody else for the past year that has called what Jerry Sandusky did to maybe scores of children for a period of at least fifteen years "child sex abuse." Let's be clear. Sandusky raped children. Children. He raped them. Headlines have used the cleaned up euphemism so as to protect our sensibilities, perhaps, but that only compounds the offense. Sandusky raped children and if we refuse to say so, we perpetuate the illusion that it doesn't happen and can justify the other headlines that claim we've all been "shocked" by the revelations. If we are still "shocked" at the disclosure of children being raped, we need to get over it because our denial doesn't mean it isn't happening and makes it possible for it to go on in churches and schools and gyms and homes all over the country every day of the week. If we insist on keeping this in the "shocking" category, we're suggesting it isn't happening with much frequency.
We're lying to ourselves and re-victimizing all of the children who have been assaulted by Sandusky and others like him if we can't at least call by name what has been done and acknowledge that nothing about this will ever be anything like "justice" for Sandusky or his victims.