Larry Nassar Is a Familiar Monster
When
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina handed down her sentence on Larry Nassar last
week, she spoke to and of him as a kind of monster we rarely see. She
was wrong.
I
know this because I remember Penn State, where an assistant football
coach named Jerry Sandusky worked his way through boy after boy across
year after year.
I know this because I haven’t forgotten what happened in the Boy Scouts of America decades ago.
And
I know this from the extensive time that I once spent studying and even
interviewing men who, like Nassar, were serial child molesters, except
that none of them had the lofty title — “Dr.” — that he did.
No, they had loftier ones.
The honorific “Rev.” came before their written names. People addressed them as “Father.” They were Roman Catholic priests.
In
researching and publishing a book about them, I learned a great deal
about child sexual abuse — enough to recognize that as horrifying as
Nassar’s violation of young female athletes was, he and his crime spree
weren’t anomalous. They snugly fit a pattern. And taking full and proper
note of that is the best way — the only way — to protect children from
the other Nassars out there.
In Nassar’s case there were two primary institutions, U.S.A. Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Both behaved unconscionably.
In the cases of the scores of priests whom I investigated, it was the
Roman Catholic Church: its individual congregations, its dioceses, all
the way up to the Vatican. The Boy Scouts organization was deemed so
irresponsible that in 2010, a jury ordered it to pay $18.5 million
to a former scout who had been abused in the 1980s. Athletic officials
at Penn State, including the legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, disregarded warnings about Sandusky. In the short term, taking action is infinitely more uncomfortable and harder than simply wishing it all away.
It’s
interesting that Sandusky’s name wasn’t more prevalent over the past
week, as the attention to Nassar’s story and the efforts to wring some
meaning from it intensified. The parallels are striking and instructive.
Although Sandusky’s victims were boys, he, like Nassar, constructed his
professional life so that he had steady access to children and appeared
to be an altruist in their midst. He started a foster home, which
evolved into a nonprofit group for troubled youth so large and well
regarded that it received one of President George H. W. Bush’s “Points
of Light” awards.
“Children
constantly surrounded Sandusky, so much so that they became part of his
persona,” Joe Posnanski wrote in his book “Paterno.” That same
description applies to Nassar. It also applies to many of the abusive
priests who went undetected and unpunished before the Catholic Church
finally owned up to its failures and instituted necessary reforms.
Nassar
had girls stretched out and pliant on his examining table. Sandusky
roughhoused, wrestled and showered with boys in the name of sports.
Nassar’s victims and their parents were awestruck
by his ties to Olympic athletes, his floor passes to elite
competitions, the mementos on his office walls. Sandusky’s victims were
dazzled by his position smack in the middle of all of those football
stars and all of that football glory.
In an article about Sandusky in The New Yorker,
Malcolm Gladwell observed that he “built a sophisticated,
multimillion-dollar, fully integrated grooming operation, outsourcing to
child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children.”
Change “child-care professionals” to gymnastics coaches and Gladwell
could have been analyzing Nassar.
Grooming.
Such a chilling word. Such an apt one. Abusers introduce themselves as
instructors and allies. They can lift your score. They can improve your
grades. They can provide the guidance that you lack or the fun that
you’re missing. Bit by bit, they ask for bigger chunks of your time and
suggest increasingly private encounters. The pace of the journey varies,
but not its arc or its destination.
And
they concoct justifications for what they’re doing, trying to persuade
their victims of its righteousness as they simultaneously persuade
themselves. Nassar’s so-called medical treatments exemplified this, as
did the actions of many priests. I recall one who told a boy that the
touching was part of his confession and his purification. I recall
another who told a girl that she’d been assigned the task of helping
him, a professed celibate, to better understand human sexuality so that
he could minister more effectively to his flock.
Many abusive priests invoked the permission of God. Nassar cited the demands of science.
An
overwhelming majority of adults who treat, teach, coach and counsel
children are nothing like these men. To distrust all of them would be a
terrible mistake and grievous disservice, both to them and to the kids
who stand to benefit mightily from their attention.
But
to find easy reassurance in the station that an adult possesses, the
privileges that he bestows and the cause that he serves would be a
greater mistake still.
The reckoning last week in that Michigan courtroom — where survivors of Nassar’s abuse emerged from silence and isolation to confront him
and the world with the damage that he had done — wasn’t like anything
I’d previously witnessed. But Nassar? There were similar monsters before
him. And there will be similar monsters after.
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