It has been my experience that we women can be a pretty cut-throat bunch. We judge everything all the time, and, for better or worse, there is little that escapes our scrutiny. Maybe it is inherent in our DNA, causing us to be suspicious in nature and punishing in practice.
In the report on Penn State and the serial child rapist they employed for decades, it wasn’t much of a secret when even the janitors related stories of unspeakable things they witnessed with this coach and young boys in the locker room.
Like the church I’ve belonged to all my life, there was an informed network of educated men who made decisions to enable the crime and the criminal in order to save the institution, and doing nothing became an acceptable solution lamb after sacrificial lamb.
From the defensive and head coach to the parish priest and bishop, the inept and immoral leaders in power thought they had it figured out until it began unraveling, for they didn’t count on the mother who sensed that something was horribly wrong with this man who befriended her and then her child. They didn’t count on the mother pleading with her child to tell her what happened while praying that it wasn’t what she suspected it might be. They didn’t count on the mother, though trembling with fear, who refused to back down from the institution or the intimidation or the payoff. They didn’t count on the mother who wasn’t about to let any of them get away with abusing the child she loved before she even knew the color of his eyes.
They didn’t count on the mother picking up the phone and calling the police to report a crime, thus deciding that Judgement Day would be coming with or without God.