After being smacked in the face by wave upon wave of sex abuse scandals for the past decade, it's easy to feel nothing but angry or numb. So Joe Paterno's statue came down, a slew of dioceses went bankrupt, and thousands of once-secret documents about molesters in the Boy Scouts will soon be made public. It's fair to ask: Have we learned anything? That makes it a good time to step back and look beyond individual villains to the big picture. When you put together the stories of Penn State, the Roman Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and other organizations hit by abuse scandals, you see they reacted in much the same way. Their behavior was shocking, but it was more common than we knew.
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Patrick Boyle: Boy Scout child sex abuse -- this kind of scandal is way too familiar
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For decades, he says, trusted institutions ignored abuse in order to protect themselves
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But lawsuits, publicity have brought this into the light and spurred improvements, he says
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Boyle: Organizations gearing up to prevent it, kids more likely to report and be believed
Religious communities: The practice of keeping abuse allegations from secular authorities has a long tradition in several denominations besides the @placeholder.