Our children often have a unique vantage point on the world adults have created. They see the contradictions between what we say and what we do. In the book Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time, a white student at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 describes looking out the window of her classroom one day and watching a mob of whites chase a black newspaper reporter who was in town to cover the integration of the high school. Betsy recalls: "In that moment, while I'm watching this, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, hand on my heart, I'm thinking, there's something wrong here … What's wrong with this picture?"

Even when we comfort ourselves with the fantasy that they are "too young to understand," children see the difference between our public pronouncements and the actions that more accurately reflect our values. Children see because they are often the victims of our wrongheaded policies, our selfish dogmatic thinking and even our abusive conduct.

Despite our rhetorical references to our children as our nation's "treasure," despite the stated concern of politicians, movie stars, community leaders, clergy and even parents that our focus is always on "the children," the truth is that, far too often, our children are treated as an expendable commodity, neither heard nor seen, and too often unprotected. How we respond to the Penn State tragedy will show where we place our values.

And so the Penn State child abuse scandal holds a spotlight up to an ugly truth about contemporary American values. It's hard to even calculate the failures of adults in the scandal -- those who saw and heard, and called their bosses and their fathers and school administrators, but never the police. If even half of the allegations asserted in the detailed grand jury indictment are true (and they remain allegations that have not yet been proven), then Jerry Sandusky is a calculating predator -- a stalker of children, who created and used a foundation for troubled youth to feed his insatiable sexual desire for adolescent boys. 

Perhaps we are naive to be shocked. As all adults know, monsters do exist. They live among us, created often by their own experiences as child victims of horrific physical or psychological abuse. Many are respectable citizens, wielding enormous power over communities and their own families. And we know that this makes these monsters even more scary and more dangerous. We tell our children to beware of "bad men." But we are often unwilling to tell them to beware of "good men." And too often we are seduced by the allure of these "good men" ourselves, refusing to believe what our eyes and our instincts tell us is true.

Instead, adults too often protect institutions, family members and even their own ambitions before they protect children. This is particularly true where child sexual abuse is concerned. We have created and perpetuated an obviously inadequate legal regime in most states that either restricts those adults (pdf) who are obligated to report child sexual abuse to narrow categories, or requires that adults report child abuse to the department of youth or social services rather than the police. In other states, the law provides no authority for the state to criminally prosecute those who fail to report child abuse, removing the likelihood that those who fail to report will ever be punished.