> 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 don’t see why you think that supports your argument.

Here's another, December of last year, there are a lot of these: "Three school administrators in Bellingham accused of failing to report alleged sexual assault"

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellingham/school-a...

If teachers are willing to cover up for random child molesters in the community what do you think they'd do for one of their own?

> what do you think they’d do for one of their own?

Hang them out to dry, as should be evident by your failure to find examples.

Teachers failing to report student on student violence isn’t actively protecting perpetrators the way the church was reported as doing. Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up. It’s a very different situation.

> Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up.

From a few months ago: Oversight failures allow sexually abusive teachers to quietly move from school to school

"It's called passing the trash," said Morgan Stewart, an attorney representing students who have accused teachers of sexual abuse at Redlands Unified District schools. "They'd give them recommendations, they'd give them approvals. You've got this culture that just allows it to happen again and again."

Failing to report reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse is a crime, yet federal officials and experts told CBS they believe school administrators often do not contact authorities for fear of damaging the reputation of a teacher or the school. And teachers told CBS they observed a culture that discouraged reporting suspicions of misconduct in their schools.

TLDR: This practice is repeated in schools across the United States, risking harm to millions of children, according to experts and federal officials. On average, one offender passes through three different school districts before being stopped, and can abuse as many as 73 children in their lifetime, according to a 2010 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual...

That GAO report shows some serious lapses at private and public schools, such as using the wrong name for a criminal background investigation. It highlighted a few cases of people being given a positive recommendation after being fired for such things as watching porn on school computers.

Nationwide fingerprint checks really should be mandatory here.

Quite a leap from a textbook example of bystander effect to “teachers are protecting pedophile teachers.”

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.

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.