Kudos to Associated Press national writers Martha Irvine and Robert Tanner for a series on a story that has gone largely unreported until now: the plague of sexual abuse of children by educators.

The mainbar story is here along with a sidebar here and here (that I've found thus far). They point to a situation that obviously has terrible parallels to the Catholic Church's own abuse scandal, but with a much wider scope and much less accountability.

Anyone who has covered abuse stores at all knew this was the case. It was the shame of many in the Church to cite other fields--like education--in hopes of excusing or diverting attention from the Church's problems. Yet it was the shame of the media to focus for so long on the Catholic Church to the exclusion of the schools, or other arenas we might cite.

Let's hope this prompts the broader awareness and investigation that is needed--and without which, I fear, some of the suffering of the Catholic crisis will have been for naught.