You can’t blame diverse religious groups for the presence of pedophiles and abusers. Pick any profession, teachers, doctors, scientists, dentists, whatever, and you’ll find that there are some low number of criminals and psychopaths in their midst. But religion is somewhat unusual in that this seems to happen routinely.

The police suspect that the ultra-Orthodox community in which the resident lived knew of the alleged incidents but chose not to report them to the police or authorities.

In this case, it’s a pedophile rabbi, but it’s the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing with Catholic child-abusers: somehow, the fact that the culprit has some esteem within a narrow community becomes an excuse to pardon criminality. It’s probably not exclusively religious in nature (the Roman Polanski case is similar), but a product of an ingrown, isolationist group that puts protection of its privileges from outsiders ahead of policing infractions within itself. Religion just seems to be very good at building walls around its practitioners. That might even be its primary function.