As the screenwriter Scott Rosenberg has written about Weinstein, “Everybody knew.” (The full quotation includes a colloquial adverb of emphasis between “everybody” and “knew.”)

“Maybe we didn’t know the degree. The magnitude of the awfulness,” Rosenberg continued. “But we knew something.”

And yet no one did anything about it. People were afraid to, or didn’t know how. So they — we — became part of an unwitting conspiracy of inaction.

This conspiracy has spanned the relatively powerless, like interns, secretaries and teenagers, to the wealthy and famous, as well as every level of power in between. Jill Abramson, my old boss, is one of the toughest journalists I know. Still, as a midlevel manager two decades ago, she didn’t go over the head of her old boss — Oreskes — to report his behavior at The Times, as she regretfully said last week.

Post-Weinstein, the emphasis has been on holding other abusers accountable. So far, each seems to deserve his delayed consequences. (And, yes, the severity of the various abuses varies.) I hope the exposés continue.

But post facto truth and punishment are not enough. We also need to figure out how to prevent future abuse. We need to make inaction feel unacceptable.

Doing so will require changes from both organizations and individuals. Every workplace and school should be asking itself: Do people here know how to report a suspicion of abuse? Do they feel comfortable doing so even when, as is typical, they have only an incomplete sense of it?