They started calling right away, just after the Penn State sex abuse scandal hit the news.
Teens and young men, mostly, who had spent years in a private hell that nobody knew of and that they never spoke of.
But something in the sound of Jerry Sandusky’s voice, as the former defensive coordinator told the nation that he was only “horsing around” in the shower with little boys, moved them to speak. Or maybe it was the awful familiarity of the grand jury indictment, seeing their own secret laid out in black and white.
The nation’s sex abuse hotlines are ringing like mad — for at least one national hotline, at 54 percent above normal — with victims who have decided to speak out.
“I haven’t seen anything like it. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, I’ve never seen any type of reaction like this,” said Jennifer Marsh, who is the hotline director at the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network, which is based in the District but takes calls and e-mails from all over the nation.
At that hotline, 72 percent of the victims who reach out are between 13 and 24, and half of them are discussing abuse or rapes that took place five or more years ago, Marsh said.
“A lot of them are male,” Marsh said. “When they go online to reach us, it’s usually male victims, because of the anonymity they find online.”
This broken silence might be the only positive legacy of the Penn State scandal and the spectacle of a pillar of the community being charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing children for 15 years.
Sandusky is scheduled to make a courtroom appearance Dec. 13. Rape and abuse counselors are bracing for another onslaught of calls that may be triggered by more details about the way Sandusky allegedly used his charity for disadvantaged kids, the Second Mile Foundation, to court his victims with gifts, trips and laserlike focus. In some cases, he is accused of raping them.
Already, a string of similar tragedies is being unwound across the country. Syracuse University fired assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine over the weekend after a third man came forward with accusations that he was molested by Fine when he was a ball boy. The first accuser said he was inspired by the Sandusky victims.
And Steffon Rodney Christian, a former library aide and coach in a Manassas elementary school, was arrested this month after a 29-year-old man reported that he was molested as a fourth-grader. Police told Washington Post reporter Josh White that Christian became close with students — especially those experiencing family trouble — by taking them on golf trips, hosting them at his home and giving them gifts.
Sound familiar?
In Fairfax County the other day, Chris Davies put the phone down just two minutes before I called him.
“I just got off the line with someone, a man who said he was abused as a child and because of everything he’s seen in the news, he finally wants to come forward and prosecute,” said Davies, who supervises the counseling team at Fairfax County’s Office for Women & Domestic and Sexual Violence Services.
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