This example was sickening, and people should be outraged. What could possibly have been so important that you look the other way? Football?
But powerful people behave like this both inside and outside universities more than many care to admit. People love to point fingers at the Catholic church and now Penn State. Those examples are egregious, but:
While, statistics on illegal activities are hard to acquire, the New York State Office of Children and Family Services estimates that New York City–alone–is home to more than 2,000 sexually exploited children under 18. The International Labour Organization (ILO) figures for the year 2003 that there are as many as 1.8 million children exploited in prostitution or pornography worldwide.
That’s a lot of looking the other way.
About those statistics, here’s a very interesting story about expectations, moral framing, and respondent driven sampling.
As for Penn State, my main reaction is that now I don’t have to imagine what it was like in the year 33 when a crowd was yelling “give us Barabbas!”
I have an alternative theory other than gender focus and political correctness–which the journalist seems to want to blame. Most feminist theories that I’ve studied can and do allow for what you see here: narratives that frame girls as sexual objects are perfectly acceptable–they must simply be protected from ‘bad men’. But if you put boys in the picture, then it’s not a simple bad man story any more–it comes down to much more difficult and intractable issues about poverty, male vulnerability (a taboo subject), *and* bad men who have a much darker kink than the inability to control the (perfectly natural, somewhat sanctioned, but should be controlled) taste for girls.