it's difficult for me to understand who knew what when. i can only relate this to an experience in my own family when a family member was raped when she was 15. there were some who didn't want to report it because they didn't want her to be put through the public humiliation of a trial. i never understood that part; i can only imagine that if i was raped as a teen, yeah, it would be an embarrassing process to go public. but i've just never been one to put embarrassment over, pardon the clich, 'doing what is right.' several of us made it very clear that we were not going to turn a blind eye (i was 18 at the time), public humiliation or not. as it turns out, all the authorities did was charge the guy with statutory rape, the son of a bitch ended up with probation and i suspect it was all due to the fact he was a local professional and his indictment was somehow seen as an embarrassment to the community.
this whole deal at penn state is nothing more than a microcosm of what happened within the catholic church, and as wrong as the priests and others involved were, the people i still blame just as much are those parents who ended up settling out of court.
guess we'll find out more facts, at least i hope facts become more available in this deal. but i'm left wondering what all of the parents were doing when this stuff first started to happen in the late-90s and when the incident in 2002 came about. again, it's not knowing who knew what when that have me concerned.
if your teen-aged son came to you in 2002 and told you this, and you reported it to the police, how long would you remain silent before you simply went public yourself? if the authorities -- the police and the university -- didn't file any charges until 2011, would you have remained silent about it that long?