Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Punishing A Pedophile

The damning testimony by many child victims against former Penn State assistant football coach and serial pedophile, Jerry Sandusky, 68, saw him being put away behind bars yesterday for a period of 30 - 60 years. In essence, Sandusky is going to spend the rest of his life behind bars because there is no possibility of parole before the minimum 30 years, according to Pennsylvania law. This harsh sentence is something that he so richly deserves, though it is in no way going to mitigate the mental agony and suffering of all the boys that he sexually abused during his tenure at Penn State.

Sandusky has been convicted on 45 counts of child sexual abuse, but what is most heinous is the callous attitude of the university officials towards the crime. Despite one of their own graduate assistants, Mike McQueary, having reported to them of having seen Sandusky raping a child in a locker room shower, the administration seems to have been so bent on safeguarding its own reputation, and hence sweeping the whole thing under the rug. Now that retribution is being doled out, the university has the gargantuan task of redeeming itself and atoning for its sins. And one can only imagine all the legal action that Penn State is going to be mired in, in the years to come!

Pedophiles have always been known to groom their victims before abusing them, and so did Sandusky, through his charitable organization for troubled boys. It gave him the perfect front and provided him with the ideal hunting ground to feed his perversions. Sandusky still insists he did nothing wrong, and is planning to appeal his conviction. He believes he is the victim of a conspiracy hatched against him by the media, Penn State, investigators, prosecutors, and others, and it only goes to show how perpetrators of such heinous crimes are caught up in their own warped realities. It also becomes the sole responsibility of the people around to stop such abuse when they see it happening and help the victims towards hope and rehabilitation.

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