Comment by exasperaited

You're basically saying at least one of these things here and you don't seem to know you are saying it:

- If it's not something you can at least sue over or is not illegal, it's not misconduct we should care about.

- If no one was at least prepared to sue, we should all just let it be.

I think perhaps you don't understand that quite a lot of persistent unwanted behaviour never rises to that standard (or perhaps no individual victim was willing to put their head above the parapet).

Anyone who has worked in education can tell you about someone whose unwanted behaviour escaped scrutiny for decades because each individual incident had enough deniability. I have never worked in education and I can identify at least two such cases from my own experiences. (Very likely a third, and there is no way that third person would ever have seen any kind of censure for what they were doing, because it was so deniable and because their victims would not even have classified themselves as victims)

There are plenty of occasions where a community quietly agreeing that someone's behaviour is unacceptable has kept them from a situation where the harms they cause can escalate.