Euphemistic relabeling of abuse as horseplay enables willful ignorance

Evidence

In an interview with the New York Times, Graham Spanier reported that he was never told that Sandusky committed a sexual offense in the shower: … “If Gary Shultz or Tim Curley has said to me anything about child abuse, sexual abuse, anything criminal, even had hinted about that possibility, of course we would have said something” (Sokolove, 2014). Instead he says the encounter was described to him as boisterous “horseplay.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 581

Categorization

• DEFINE: Textbook instance of euphemistic labeling, Bandura’s moral disengagement mechanism — reframing abuse as harmless play to keep it outside moral judgment.
• XREF: This ‘horseplay’ relabeling is the precise mechanism corroborating the reader’s synthesis goal: how institutional actors rationalize supporting harmful policy while believing themselves decent.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 581