@monica20 The Emma report was imo much more thorough than the Choate report, and it appears that the Emma investigative attorneys were afforded significantly more latitude than those investigating Choate. In particular, the Emma lawyers tracked down third party reports and apparently had unfettered access to personnel files. That report gave me a lot of confidence that Emma was truly attempting to be as open and thorough as possible given their institutional limitations and priorities.
From my reading of the Choate report, I do not have any confidence that the report would have picked up recent instances of abuse if there were any. Schools and institutions have increasingly turned to confidential settlements, in which the victim agrees to maintain confidentiality (with the usual carve-outs for subpoenas and pursuant to court orders, etc.). Since Choate did not waive attorney client privilege, and did not (apparently) afford unfettered access to personnel files, the Choate attorneys might not have been aware of all abuse allegations, especially recent ones covered by settlement agreements. Of course, someone always knows about these, and that’s why I continue to be troubled by the explicit admission by the Choate investigators that “we generally refrained from reaching out to a Choate graduate who reportedly experienced adult sexual misconduct but who did not come forward to us, even if we received a report about that graduate from another source” as I mentioned in my post #109 above.
Remember that these reports are largely about spin. The schools would like the public to believe that the behavior is in the distant past, to the maximum extent possible given the facts and the institutional benefits of “coming clean.” Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that all the schools have cleaned up their acts dramatically, given the attention these scandals are getting now, so I don’t think that sexual abuse, harassment, predation, etc. are significant worries going forward.