The mainstream media have heavily covered sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, but some say the national news media have ignored an estimated 5 million students who have been sexually abused by their public-school teachers.
Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, suggested a cover up by school officials.
"Reports aren't being made by administrators when these allegations come to light," she said. "They are allowing too many teachers to quietly resign and move on to go molest somebody else's children."
Miller says the percentage of teachers who molest students is small, but when they're allowed to quietly resign, it casts a cloud of suspicion over all educators. She called it 'passing the trash' and said school administrators should be held to account.
Bob Unruh has kept a running list of teacher-student sex scandals for WorldNetDaily.
"The procedures are not really set up to publicize and let people know about predators," he said, "but really to conceal and to protect that person's tenure or protect a job, or allow them to resign and move on to another location."
Bob Knight, director with the Culture and Media Institute, said the media have been no-shows on covering the larger scandal.
"If the media treated the school scandals they way they treated the Catholic Church," he said, "they'd be calling for reforms, top to bottom, they'd be questioning the validity of the institutions themselves."
