Few, if any, reputational and financial assaults on traditionalist, conservative organizations were more effective than the child abuse scandals levied against the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America. This is not to say that these abuse cases weren’t horrific, shattering the very innocence of youth that these organizations were entrusted to protect. Nor is it to say that the institutions in question didn’t need a reckoning and serious reform — which both subsequently undertook with great vigor and success.
However. These scandals were very deliberately, selectively brought, hyped, and enforced. The news and entertainment brigades rose to the occasion, saturating the American consciousness with the idea that priests and Scout leaders were all pedophiles. And the campaigns’ effectiveness was astounding. Millions left the faith, citing “betrayal” by the Catholic church. (Some of my dear friends are among them, and it’s extremely disheartening to see.) The church has also been forced to sell off countless valuable properties, fire staff, and consolidate parochial schools to settle claims.
Meanwhile, the once-mighty BSA began feminizing its culture by letting girls into its flagship Scouting programs in 2018. It filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and rebranded as Scouting America in 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth is pressuring the youth organization to recommit to its roots, but technically, the Boy Scouts of America no longer exists.
All of this was accomplished by highlighting adult predations on minors within these organizations, jamming the airwaves with a grossly exaggerated narrative that they were nothing more than abuse factories, and pig-piling legal claims to sap their assets. Morale, reputation, and finances lay in ruins after the attacks.
But what if I told you those scandals were nothing? That there was a child abuse scandal 50, perhaps 100 times worse? That it spans the nation and continues unabated to this day, and yet most Americans never even give it a thought? Read on.
In Los Angeles County, the school board just approved a bond for the Unified School District to borrow $250 million. This money is on top of the $500 million the district borrowed last year. With financing costs, the overall loss will top $1 billion. This taxpayer money will not be used to purchase equipment or pay teachers, but to pay out settlements to victims of childhood sexual abuse by school personnel.
The story is the same throughout California. The Fresno Bee ran down additional high-ticket cases and settlements in an editorial last July:
▪ Santa Barbara County’s Carpinteria Unified is facing financial insolvency after it was slapped with four lawsuits alleging abuse by a principal in the 1970s and early 1980s. The principal has since died, and the school he oversaw no longer exists, but the school district will have to pay any settlements in those cases.
▪ Clovis Unified is being sued by five women alleging they were sexually abused by a former teacher at Fancher Creek Elementary who was sentenced to 38 years in prison in 2014 for producing child sexual abuse material.
Even schools that aren’t accused of allowing abuse are getting socked with massive increases in their liability coverage. For example, the Bee notes that “Fast-growing Manteca Unified School District expects a $1.2 million risk assessment bill for the 2025-26 school year…. That bill was $125,000 in 2021.”
“The new law has resulted in a slew of payouts to abuse survivors, most in the range of $5 million to $10 million but some much higher,” CalMatters reported last July. “In 2023, a jury delivered a $135 million verdict against Moreno Valley Unified in Riverside County.”
The “new law” is AB 218, which “dramatically expand[ed] the time people have to file lawsuits alleging they were sexually abused as children,” as Politico defined it in September. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law in 2019, and “Since then, school districts and other public entities have spent billions defending against the rush of lawsuits the law made possible.”
It’s not just California, of course. Public schools across the nation are too often run by far-left administrators and boards of ed, and staffed with far-left wack-a-doo “educators,” as teachers began calling themselves a few years back.
The unspoken scandal of child sexual abuse by public school workers is so much worse than anything the Catholic Church or BSA ever did.
For one thing, unlike the church or Scouts, school attendance is required for all children. The vast majority of them are not fortunate enough to have parents who homeschool them or send them to ritzy private schools, so they must attend public school.
For another, the vast scale of the school abuse scandal is never reported as such. While BSA and Catholic Church abuses were covered in the national aggregate, school abuses are broken down not by nation-wide impact, not even by state, but by district, and sometimes even all the way down to the granular school level. Thus, a mere two or three abuse cases sound like a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of assaults attributed to Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church.
Let's compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
How bad was the BSA epidemic of abuse? I asked Grok AI to research it for me. Grok tells me that Scouting abuse claims clocked in at 92,700. This is out of approximately 130 million children who participated in Scouting over the years. So, in other words, .07% of Scouts claimed to have been abused as minors by adults in the program. Of the over 35 million adults who have served as Scout leaders or employees, 7,819 were identified as predators over the course of the reckoning. That works out to .022% of Scouters.
How about the Catholic Church scandal? Setting my research parameters back to 1950, I found it is almost impossible to get an accurate estimate of how many children and youth participated in Catholic worship and/or programs since then, and their participation levels varied. An estimate of 100 million as the number of children who had contact with priests and adults within the church structure is ballpark for our purposes. Likewise, it is hard to get a clean total of the number of credible abuse claims, due to the decentralized nature of addressing them, but 25,000 is a reasonable estimate. We arrive at an approximately .025% victimization rate of Catholic children. The percentage of Catholic priests in particular who were credibly accused of sexually abusing a minor during that timeframe works out to about 4.3% (4,127 accused out of 94,607 clerics). More impressive than the Scouts.
Next, I asked Grok to estimate the number of public school children and youth who claimed to have been sexually abused by teachers or school staff during the same period. Even I was shocked by the answer: According to the seminal 2004 Shakeshaft Report (commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education), ~6.7% of students reported physical contact or abuse. Moreover, Grok synthesized the reams of existing research and estimated:
~9.6% of K-12 students experience educator sexual misconduct (including verbal/non-contact harassment like sexual comments/jokes/gestures, and contact abuse like fondling or rape) sometime during their school years. This equates to roughly 4.5 million students affected historically (based on student surveys, e.g., reanalysis of AAUW data showing 9.6% in grades 8–11 reporting such experiences).
• Shakeshaft estimated ~290,000 students experienced physical sexual abuse by public school employees from 1991–2000 alone (a single decade), far exceeding the ~10,667 priest abuse allegations (1950–2002) in the parallel John Jay/Catholic Church study often cited for comparison.
• Reporting rates are low: Only ~6% of victims formally reported misconduct. (emphasis added)
Further, as best as the AI could estimate, between 9.6% and 11.7% of adults working in public schools (teachers, coaches, and staff) turned out to be predators.
Grok concluded:
No exact "total claims since 1950" exists (likely in the hundreds of thousands to millions if extrapolating prevalence estimates to cumulative unique students over generations, but this includes unreported/unsubstantiated cases).
So in summary, in sheer numbers, American victims of childhood sexual abuse totals stand at:
BSA: 92,700 (.07%)
Catholic Church: ~25,000 (.025%)
Public schools: Hundreds of thousands to millions (6.7%)
And the percentage of adults within these institutions who abused kids works out to:
BSA: .022%
Catholic Church: 4.3%
Public schools: ~9.6% to 11.7%
Yet unlike the Boy Scouts or Catholic Church, which were devastated by reputational harm and financial loss, public schools sail on, reputations untarnished, and with all financial penalties paid off by the lowly taxpayers.
The public perception of the BSA and the Catholic Church as havens for predators, while public school teachers are consistently lionized, is a testament to the power of the narrative weavers.
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