The Mystery of the Penn State Scandal

Via the Dish, Daniel Mendelsohn tackles an issue which I've been wondering about since the Penn State story broke:

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).
Mr. McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.
Mr. McQueary’s refusal to process the scene he described — his coach having sex with another male — was reflected in the reaction of the university itself, which can only be called denial. You see this in the squeamish treatment of the assaults as a series of inscrutable peccadilloes best discussed — and indulged — behind closed doors. (Penn State’s athletic director subsequently characterized Mr. Sandusky’s alleged act as “horsing around,” a term you suspect he would not have used to describe the rape of a 10-year-old girl.)

My particular variation of this question comes down to: why is pedophilia so often covered up?  Everyone agrees it is astonishingly wrong.  Everyone is disturbed by the crime.  So why protect the perpetrator by allowing the crime to be covered up?  Pedophiles are notorious for serial crime.  It would be different if it was a crime you didn't expect to occur again.  I think that people are so horrified by the crime that they want to pretend it didn't happen, especially if the person who discovers the crime is close to EITHER the victim or the perpetrator.  The crime is assumed to be so damaging for the victim that even the vicitm's parents don't want to go public with accusations, making it that much easier for people of authoity who would be harmed by the exposition of the perpetrator to cover it up.  As painful and difficult as it might be, we need to recognize that while the crime is horrific, it has occurred throughout history, and will occur in the future.  The best way to fight it is to be more willing to discuss that it occurs, and to be more supportive of victims and their families when such crimes occur.  Too often, we feel that the victims' parents should have realized the crime was going on, and hold them partially responsible.  Likewise, we assume the victims are permanently scarred and ruined, but such an attitude can prevent parents from coming forward.  Another problem is that we turn these crimes into media circuses, which is the exactly wrong thing for the vicitms.  As hard as it seems, we need to treat these crimes as less horrific.  Mendelsohn is right, homophobia plays a big part in the problem, but I don't understand why the rape of boys is something people would rather cover up than talk about.  In the retreat to silence, witnesses are accessories to crime.