Bernie Fine and Jerry Sandusky are making headlines, but it isn’t for their sporting achievements.
Fine is from Syracuse, and has three victims. One of his victims alleges Fine touched him from the beginning of seventh grade until he turned 27 years old. Officials are still investigating the alleged sexual abuse case.
Sandusky is from Penn State. Through his non-profit charity for underprivileged boys, The Second Mile, Sandusky was able to molest 10 boys. Sandusky is being charged with “40 counts relating to the alleged sexual abuse of eight boys he met through The Second Mile,” according to CNN.
Before Fine and Sandusky, there was Donald Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick molested nearly a dozen young African-American boys, at Winter Haven, Fl., while he was the clubhouse manager for the Red Sox. Fitzgerald was charged with four counts of attempted sexual battery between 1975 and 1989.
Rick Lopez, a women’s basketball coach for the high school basketball travel team Colorado Hoopsters, was charged with 59 counts of physical and sexual assault in July of 2004. In December of 2004, he hung himself in his jail cell.
A 1995 study by Sandra Kirby, a sociology professor at the University of Winnipeg, concluded that 22.8 percent of a Canadian sample “had sexual intercourse with a coach or other person in position of authority within their sport.”
In 2003, a Seattle Times investigation found “159 coaches reprimanded or fired for sexual misconduct in the past decade in Washington state alone.” The investigation also stated that 98 of the 159 still coach or teach at schools.
The common ground among all these cases is that they all involve coaches taking advantage of their players or younger, defenseless children. But more recent cases have surfaced of athletes themselves victimizing their peers.
In Massachusetts, two younger players on Andover High’s men’s basketball team were forced to play “ookie cookie,” where one of the younger players was forced to eat an Oreo cookie, covered in bodily fluid. The other player switched schools.
An incident closer to home is the Castle Park High School’s football team hazing of another member on the team with a pencil.
In a study by Alfred University in 2000, found that “1.5 million U.S. high school students – 48 percent of students who were members of school groups were subjected to hazing each year.” Hazing has gotten more violent and sexual since 1995.
In sports, it is easy to not be aware of or to look the other way because coming forth might label one a traitor or disloyal to the organization. But the trend of sexual assaults in sports, whether it is between coaches and ball boys, charity founders and underprivileged boys, or players and younger teammates, is in fact showing disloyalty—to humanity. Coaches are the faces of their respective organizations and it is their duty to represent their school or organization with honor and integrity. Players must represent their organizations with those same principles. So when players and coaches think they are being loyal to their organizations by sweeping the rug over these horrific incidents, they are in fact doing their organizations a huge disservice. They are showing that protecting criminals and winning games is more important than the life of innocent individuals.
At the end of the day, it’s not about the program.It is about morality. It is about protecting the safety and the basic human rights of these innocent lives.