University in the fall of 2011 were severe. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) imposed significant penalties against the football program that had employed Jerry Sandusky as an assistant coach — including a $60-million fine and a post-season ban of four years. Joe Paterno, Penn State’s iconic football coach, was fired in November 2011, and passed away shortly thereafter. University President Graham Spanier, who resigned from his post that same month, was recently charged along with two other administrators with perjury, obstruction of justice, and endangering children in the alleged cover-up of the whole scandal.
T But none of that mattered as much as the damage to the
lives of the children whom Sandusky abused, and Penn State was determined to build something positive for them, and for victims everywhere. “Our central university administration made a commitment last November [2011] to become a place that people could go to learn about child sexual abuse,” said Pamela Driftmier, M.Ed., Penn State’s director of confer- ences, “and for Penn State to develop a reputation and pro- vide research, training, and opportunities for people to come together around this topic, in the hope of ultimately prevent- ing child sexual abuse.” No small task, of course, especially given the backlash
that Penn State experienced from the public as the scandal unfolded, making people skeptical of how the university might address the sensitive topic. But in the end, the Penn State Justice Center for Research, the College of the Liberal Arts, and Penn State Outreach decided to hold the Child Sexual Abuse Conference on Traumatic Impact, Prevention, and Intervention (CSAC). The “amount of misinformation and lack of information
about child sexual abuse that became clear in the conversa- tions people were having about the scandal” had prompted the Justice Center for Research to plan on holding a confer- ence on the topic even before it knew the school’s board of trustees had also decided on one, said Kate Staley, Ph.D., a research scientist with the Justice Center for Research and CSAC’s main content organizer. When she and Doris MacKenzie, Ph.D., head of the Justice Center for Research, realized they didn’t want to plan an additional, and possibly
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conflicting, conference, the obvious answer was to join forces with the board — which ended up asking the Justice Center to organize the event.
THE SPACE BETWEEN Initially, Penn State administration wanted to hold CSAC in April 2012, a mere five months after Sandusky’s indict- ment on 52 counts of sexual crimes against children, and two months before his trial was scheduled to begin. But with such short notice, and given the large number of conferences that Penn State hosts each year, the space for an event of the size organizers were planning — more than 500 attendees and members of the press from across the country — simply wasn’t available. Organizers turned their attention to fall, when there were two dates available in October. They settled on Oct. 29–30 at the Penn Stater Conference Hotel in State College, Penn., about two miles off campus. “We took the meeting space that we had, and then we
designed the conference around that space,” Driftmier said, “with the goal of maximizing the number of attendees and providing them with the experience where they could net- work with each other.” CSAC programming took place almost entirely in the Penn Stater’s Presidents Hall, a 10,650-square- foot ballroom that was divided into four sections — three set in round tables to accommodate attendees, a stage, and space for press in the back of the room, and the fourth set aside for 25 exhibitors who ranged from national advocacy groups like the KidSafe Foundation and MaleSurvior to Penn State organizations such as One Heart, a coalition of students