The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Darran Simon
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — In the days after the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal broke, Alison Kiss’ organization fielded a flurry of calls about a federal law that requires universities and colleges to report crimes on campus.
A deputy chief of security from a Southeastern university called with a question. A vice president of student affairs from a university in the Northeast called. So did a director of judicial affairs for a Midwestern institution.
“I hope that the calls we have received is an indicator of what’s to come,” Kiss, executive director of the Wayne, Pa., nonprofit group Security on Campus Inc., said Saturday about the increase in calls. “It would be wonderful if institutions actually start to take a proactive step to adhere to the letter of the law and embrace the spirit of the law.”
Security on Campus, a national victim-advocacy and training agency, was founded by the family of Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Clery, who was beaten, raped, and murdered in 1986 in her dorm room by a student whom she did not know.
Her parents said they learned only after her death that numerous earlier crimes and security lapses had been unreported by the university.
After her death, the family learned that there was no law requiring universities to report crimes. They pushed for a federal law, which passed in 1990, that requires colleges and universities to tell the public about all crimes and publish an annual report with crime statistics and safety policies.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would investigate whether Pennsylvania State University officials failed to follow the law and notify authorities about the alleged sexual assaults of children on the Penn State campus by a former football assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky.
In calling for the probe, Rep. Patrick Meehan (R., Pa.) said that adults have the responsibility “to act and report when they see children who are abused or threatened. In the case of college authorities, it’s not just a moral obligation, it’s the law.
”. . . Had authorities at Penn State reported the allegations to law enforcement and properly disclosed these allegations under the law, perhaps children could have been protected from abuse.”
While she has no inside information about the Penn State case, Kiss said the failure of officials to report allegations of child sexual abuse was a symptom of preferential treatment in college athletics.
“The magnitude of what has happened, fortunately, we haven’t seen something like that,” she said. “But when you look at college athletics, unfortunately, we see a culture of protecting the team, coaches, or boosters of a team.”
She said she hoped universities would take stronger steps to provide training about the law, including sensitivity on working with victims of sexual assaults.
She said she hoped that those in college athletics would take a firmer stand against violence.
“If anything, I think this should be a challenge to male athletes and coaches to stand up to violence.”
Sandusky has been charged with molesting eight boys over 15 years, and athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz have also been arrested on charges that they failed to notify authorities after being told about an incident of sexual abuse in 2002 and that they lied about it to a grand jury.
At that time, a graduate assistant reported seeing Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy, the grand jury says. The assistant, Mike McQueary, testified that he reported the incident to head coach Joe Paterno, who notified Schultz and Curley.
University president Graham B. Spanier and Paterno were fired last week by the university’s board of trustees. The legendary coach has not been charged, but the state police commissioner had cited a lapse of “moral responsibility” for not doing more to stop Sandusky.
Over the last year, Kiss said the federal Department of Education has started to enforce the Clery Act more by reviewing complaints and auditing university crime statistics.
But compliance with the act varies among universities, Kiss said.
Penn State reported nine forcible sex offenses on its main campus in 2008, eight in 2009, and five in 2010, according to the Department of Education.
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