In many cases, investigation by the authorities was deliberately deflected. Nowhere is this truer than at Britain’s top “public schools,” as the private secondary, usually boarding, schools are known. In these, a culture of bullying and sexualized violence has been understood for more than a century as part of the process of training young men to be leaders. Teachers at 130 of these schools have been implicated; several schools are under criminal investigation by the police.

“Nobody said anything about it, for the same reason that people were mercilessly bullied and that wasn’t dealt with,” one former St. Paul’s student told me, on the condition of anonymity. “Public schools are built on the idea that it’s good for you to be abused while you’re young, so that you toughen up for when you go out and run the empire. That’s the point.”

The author Edward St. Aubyn has written scathingly about how child rape and a culture of emotional sadism were tolerated, even enabled, within aristocratic families like his own. The journalist Alex Renton told me, “That’s how you get the elite we’ve ended up with,” in discussing his own experience of sexual abuse in what he calls the “platonic forcing house of great Englishmen.”

“Hurt people hurt people” is not supposed to be a political program. That victims of child abuse often grow up to replicate that abuse, to become bullies or tyrants or covert sexual predators, has long been understood as a human tragedy. Only in Britain does it seem to have been the intrinsic psychology at the dark heart of the governing elite.

Britain’s child sex abuse scandal is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy, even an organized cover-up, could be exposed as a one-off criminal disgrace. What’s happened in Britain — and has for generations — is bigger than a conspiracy.

It is a culture of complicity that cuts across every major institution in public life: from Parliament to the police, from broadcasters to charities, from public schools to children’s homes. It operates on the tacit understanding that the rich, the powerful and the famous are permitted to exploit and hurt young people, sure in the knowledge that the elite will look after its own. Thus the scandal cuts to the bone of what sort of society Britain understands itself to be.

There are more revelations to come. Whether an honest accounting and atonement can be made for these crimes will depend on the price the British establishment places on its integrity.