Complaints against powerful figures are dismissed because no systemic database reveals a pattern

Evidence

Many complaints of sexual abuse were filed with local police, but they were ignored or dismissed for insufficient evidence. The word of a child against a denial by a knighted celebrity did not have much chance of being taken seriously. A national crime database, which did not exist at the time, would have cast a pattern of local allegations in a more believable light. Early on, the BBC investigated some complaints. They absolved Savile of any wrongdoing. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 554

Categorization

• XREF: The institutional failure to recognize a serial pattern connects to the vault’s claims about how systems enable harm through dispersed, individually-dismissable incidents.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 554