Cascade By Sandusky
Recall the recent events at Penn State, where the assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, was allegedly seen by janitor James Calhoun having inappropriate interactions with a boy around 11-13. Since then, Sandusky has been charged with 40 counts of abusing eight young boys over a period of approximately 15 years. Now, the scandal is bringing other victims of child sex abuse forward. Jeff Herman, a Miami attorney, explains: “It’s a collective empowerment for victims…Many feel isolated and alone. Then they see all this press and all of a sudden, they see victims standing up and taking on institutions.” Apparently, Mr. Herman has received about three to five calls per day from sex abuse survivors who want to tell their story. The article describes how the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network “has seen a 50% increase in the number of people turning to its online hotline for help and advice…”
The process of victim after victim coming forward to detail their experience is relevant to this course because it is somewhat of a cascade. In the course, we mostly covered cascades from a business and management perspective. According to Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, an “information cascade has the potential to occur when people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know.” In this case, the cascade emerges when one person steps forward to report an abuse, another person sees that the first person has stepped forward and infers that it has been beneficial to step forward – especially when justice is served in favor of the first person. So the second person steps forward, and the third person now sees two people who have reported sexual abuse. This third person can only assume that the first two people must know that it is of benefit to report the abuse, and so the third person will consider following suit. (This is not to say that everyone will follow suit and report abuse – the decision is an extremely difficult one and not to be taken lightly)
Furthermore, when considering how to formulate the model, we must consider the states of the world: the state in which reporting the abuse is a good idea, or the state in which reporting the abuse is a bad idea. The second model ingredient is the payoff: each person will receive some payoff based on his or her decision. In this case, the payoff is the chance for the abuser to be brought to justice. Finally, signals are involved. We can refer to a high signal as a signal that says that reporting it is a good idea, and a low signal as a signal that says that reporting it is a bad idea. The more victims come forward and report the abuse, the more high signals there are. As more victims step forward to say their piece, the number of high signals rises and the cascade continues.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-11-16/child-sex-abuse-victims-come-forward-in-wake-of-penn-state-scandal/51247912/1