Parents care about the probability of their kid being victimized. They don’t care whether 1 priest abuses 10 kids in a congregation of 300 or 10 teachers abuse 10 kids in a school of 300. The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population. There’s more complaints in one year against schools than in 50 years against the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s partly because way more people attend school (everyone) than attend Catholic church regularly. But the difference isn’t a factor of 50. In the relevant period—complaints peaked in the 1980s—probably 1 in 8 Americans attended Catholic Church weekly. (Probably even more than that because families with children are much more likely to attend church.)

Schools absolutely protect sexual abusers. At my kid’s school, it was an open secret in the 1970s through 1990s that teachers were sexually abusing students: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch.... This is an affluent, extremely progressive, private school in a deep blue state. It’s just about the opposite of the Catholic Church.

> nor are they protected by the school system.

Example from the day before yesterday: "5 school employees arrested for alleged failure to report student's sexual assault"

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/5-school-employees-arrest...

Bonus one from a couple months ago: "Knoch Primary School principal charged with failing to report alleged sexual abuse"

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/knoch-primary-school...

I think this his the nail on the head. Any time you create a role and imbue it with unimpeachable morality or trust, grant it power, and bring it into close private contact with vulnerable persons, you have a recipe for abuse. Crime requires opportunity. Sometimes abusers are created by being placed into those roles. And of course some abusers are already fully formed, and will seek out those roles. I'm sure a lot of them they don't even do it knowingly. They gaslight and groom themselves into abusers as much as they gaslight and groom their victims. They're almost always male, except for a "rounding error". And you'll the pattern in an array of different roles: police, doctor, priest, scout master, BBC TV presenter, rock star, sports coach, therapist, charity boss. The more power and trust, and the greater the contract with the vulnerable, the more it'll happen.