None of that is meant to suggest the Syracuse and Penn State cases are baseless. These accusers aren’t tiny kids wheedled into confirming grotesque fantasies. The weight of evidence is alarming, and the allegations must be taken seriously. If anything, the media apparently deserve reproach not for chasing imaginary witches but for ignoring real ones — enabling other boys to be hurt.

But the potential is worrisome. Sexual abuse of the young is an utterly incendiary topic. All parents harbor a knot of suspicion from that first day of school, when they send off the dearest and most fragile person in their lives to be cared for by strangers. Our system of nurture rests, unsteadily, on a delicate layer of trust, and without it the whole infrastructure of indispensable grownups crumbles — the teachers, counselors, coaches, pastors, Scout leaders, youth group heads, choirmasters.

The wider danger from the current scandals is in the plausibility they might confer on more hysterical and farfetched accusations, in the credibility that other accusers who shouldn’t be believed might now be given, and in the vast deterrent effect they might have on the next generation of mentors. Those are people we will need to help raise the young, and who won’t if their motives and proclivities will be doubted groundlessly, and if even a caring hand on a youngster’s shoulder will be suspected as signaling suppressed yearnings.

So the media should proceed with care into the next phase of this scandal, and there’s certain to be one. Their temptation, having deferred unwisely to the men now accused, may be to regard the journalistic sin they should most avoid as restraint. The lesson of the satanic child abuse hysteria is that zeal too has its costs.