“I think you have to get people talking about child sexual abuse,” Pamela Driftmier, Penn State’s director of conferences, told Katie. “So we provided a foundation in the basics…. We also haven’t as a society made it easy for people to talk about this, but we’re not going to change what’s happening if we avoid it.”

People looking to focus the conversation on youth sports also decided that a new conference was the way to go. Sponsored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, Safe to Compete: Protecting Child Athletes From Sexual Abuse was an invitation-only summit held in Alexandria, Va., last week, with the goal of developing “sexual abuse prevention standards which can be applied across the entire youth sports industry. Participants will develop these standards through a series of dialogues about what is effective in current child sexual abuse prevention policies and what can be improved upon. Working together, we can make sure that every child has a place where it is safe to compete.”

How terrible that these conferences are necessary. And how reassuring that they’re being held.