Special Privilege

[RANT]
The special privilege that I am talking about is for sports.

Anything sports seem to carry with it a special privilege that they can get away with sexual assaults, violence, and lawlessness if it has anything to do with sports.

Case in point:
The Penn State child sex abuse scandal started with Jerry Sandusky

Case in point:
Dr. Larry Nassar the former U.S.A. Gymnastics and Michigan State University sports clinic doctor

NCAA Remains Quiet as Athlete Sexual Assault Cases Continue
With close to $1 billion in profit, college football organization has no clear plans to battle sexual assault
Rolling Stone
By Beejoli Shah
September 16, 2016

College football has only been back in season for less than a month and already the number of alleged sexual assaults committed by football players outweighs the number of weeks played this season. The latest crop of seemingly inevitable assaults this time come from UNC Chapel Hill, where linebacker Allen Artis was suspended over a rape allegation the university appears to have suppressed, and the University of Minnesota, where four Gophers football players were suspended for allegedly raping a woman. Five alleged rapists uncovered in just two weeks of regular season football, and how many words has the NCAA spoken on the topic? Zero.

When USC football players Osa Masina and Don Hill were accused of raping a 19-year old woman this summer – Masina more than once - the pair of reserve players received a light slap on the wrist: they're sitting out of two games they likely wouldn't have seen any minutes in to begin with, while still being allowed to attend classes and practice as if they hadn't taken turns allegedly raping a drugged, unconscious woman while videotaping her assault on Snapchat and sending it to her ex-boyfriend – a football player at Pac-12 rival Arizona State University.

How many times have we read about a sexual assault that was swept under the rug to protect an athlete or a coach?

Let’s face it…
Sports = Big dollars
Sports = Prestige

The local newspaper this week had an article on the National Honor Society winners… two paragraphs.

The high school athlete who set a Connecticut… two half pages

When the high school was in the finals for the state Robotics Championship… a picture with their names.

Lawyers, status, public backlash aid college athletes accused of crimes
ESPN
By Paula Lavigne
June 15,2015

As a University of Florida running back, Chris Rainey was named a suspect in five crimes in Gainesville. He faced charges once.

Rainey's experience as a star athlete accused of criminal activity -- stalking, fighting, injuring someone with fireworks -- but ending up with a mostly clean record is not uncommon: From 2009 to 2014, male basketball and football players at the University of Florida and Florida State University avoided criminal charges or prosecution on average two-thirds of the time when named as suspects in police documents, a result far exceeding that of nonathlete males in the same age range, an Outside the Lines investigation has found.

Last fall, to determine how often crimes involving college athletes are prosecuted and what factors influence them, Outside the Lines requested police reports involving all football and men's basketball players on rosters from 2009 to 2014 from campus and city police departments covering 10 major programs: Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Michigan State, Missouri, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Texas A&M and Wisconsin. Some police departments withheld records citing state disclosure laws. (ESPN sued the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State University for not releasing material; both cases are pending on appeal.) And not all information was uniform among jurisdictions.

But available reports showed that Rainey's alma mater, Florida, had the most athletes named as suspects -- 80 in more than 100 crimes at Florida. Yet the athletes never faced charges, had charges against them dropped or were not prosecuted 56 percent of the time. When Outside the Lines examined a comparison set of cases involving college-age males in Gainesville, 28 percent of the crimes ended either without a record of charges being filed or by charges eventually being dropped.

It is time to stop letting athletes, coaches, and sports get away with rape, assaults, discrimination, and harassment we cannot not give them a free ride just because of the prestige of the universities, or for the massive amounts of dollars that they bring to the school and the ball clubs.
[/RANT]