The key episode in the Penn State case occurred in early 2001, when Sandusky was reported for molesting a young boy in a shower. After intense debate, university authorities decided not to take the case to police or child protection agencies, although university president Graham Spanier
acknowledged the danger that "we then become vulnerable for not having reported it." Sandusky went on to molest more children, leaving the university open to multi-million dollar civil litigation.
Even so, Penn State's problems run much deeper than the university currently seems to realize.
For one thing, it cannot claim in its defense that very different standards about child molestation cases prevailed at that time, so that nobody appreciated the gravity of the issue. Certainly, attitudes to child abuse have changed through the years, and were for instance very lax during the 1960s and 1970s -- it was only in 1977 that the term "child abuse" acquired its present meaning of sexual misconduct rather than physical violence. But public concern surged in the 1990s, in part as a consequence of the clergy abuse cases that became a national scandal. In multiple cases nationwide from 1992 onwards, church authorities were sued for knowingly placing abusive priests in situations where they would continue to assault children. By the end of the decade, media reports were already claiming that the U.S. Catholic Church had paid out a billion dollars in abuse settlements. By 2001, nobody who ever glanced at a newspaper or watched the television news had any excuse for not knowing this context.
