The Associated Press’ story is chilling and horrible.

Chaz Wing was 12 when they came after him. The classmates who tormented him were children, too, entering the age of pimples and cracking voices.

Eventually, he swore under oath, the boys raped him and left him bleeding, the culmination of a year of harassment. Though Chaz repeatedly told teachers and administrators about insults and physical attacks, he didn’t report being sexually assaulted until a year later, launching a long legal fight over whether his school had done enough to protect him.

That a 12-year-old could be anally raped three times in a public school, and nothing is done about it, is an outrage. According to the story, this is a huge problem.

Relying on state education records, supplemented by federal crime data, a yearlong investigation by The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015.

And there are reasons to believe that the number falls short of the real number.

Though that figure represents the most complete tally yet of sexual assaults among the nation’s 50 million K-12 students, it does not fully capture the problem because such attacks are greatly under-reported, some states don’t track them and those that do vary widely in how they classify and catalog sexual violence. A number of academic estimates range sharply higher.

Then again, if there are 50 million students per year, and 17,000 sex assaults, which aren’t rapes as told in the Chaz story, over four years, plus the variable of unreported sex assaults that may be ominous but can’t be determined because it’s an appeal to ignorance, allowing bias to take flight in the absence of data, the law of big numbers changes things.

And then there’s the other possibility, that may not have occurred to the reader who was first presented with Chaz’s story. We know it happened because the reporter tells us it did, even telling us that Chaz’s rape left him bleeding, an image that can’t help but have its intended impact. But there is no evidence except Chaz’s testimony.

From almost his first day at Brunswick Junior High, Chaz said kids harassed him, taunted him about his weight and subjected him to ordeals like a “gay test.” Complaining to teachers and administrators didn’t help, he said. He slid into depression and refused to go to school.

Then one day in 2012, his mom came home and found him curled up in her bed, rocking back and forth. She begged him to tell her what was wrong. Slowly, his words came out.

“They hurt me,” he cried.

He said he’d been raped. Three times.

If true, this is inexcusable.

The school district staunchly defends how it handled its investigation. The junior high principal said his inquiry determined that the sexual assaults were “very unlikely.” One of the accused boys, he noted, had never even heard of anal rape.

“There is — as there should be — always an inclination to believe allegations of sexual assault at the outset,” district lawyer Melissa Hewey said in an email to AP. “But sometimes, the evidence compels the conclusion that those allegations are false.”

“The little boys who were accused,” she said, “are the real victims in this case and they deserve to be protected.”

For those outside the law, the issues raised are easily resolved. Whichever way your bias takes you is the answer. After all, you can believe whatever you want and it makes no difference. You get no vote over Chaz’s life or the life of the boys he accused. They’re all just abstractions in a political war where you’re rooting for one side or another. Evidence is for haters.

There is no question that school districts should protect students from harm. That’s not an open issue. But how that’s to be accomplished, and what message is sent to those who are the victims, or claim to be victims, is another problem. And when the AP throws out numbers like 17,000 under the heading of “sex assaults,” which may once have been a meaningful category but has since been reduced to meaningless verbiage, without doing the math to show per capita allegations, suggests a purpose to evoke fear and loathing rather than illuminate. The per capita rate of sex assault in k-12 is 0.1176%. Suddenly, it doesn’t look so shocking.

Yet, this too misses the point. That it’s not the epidemic the numbers, in combination with the anecdote, suggest doesn’t mean it should happen at all. These are schools, where kids are surrounded by adults almost all day, and if they pay attention to what’s happening under their noses, they should be able to do a far better job of keeping their charges safe.

But the Chaz story offers a backhanded insight into one of the causes for the system to fail some kids. He kept his accusation to himself for a year. He didn’t tell school admins. He didn’t tell his parents. He didn’t go to the police. It’s not that his explanation for doing so is a bad one. Indeed, it’s not. But it also doesn’t serve to address the problem.

If these boys raped Chaz, it was a crime. This wasn’t some Title IX fantasy for sad girls to wring their hands over. It was a crime. Not only have we watered down the means by which the crime of rape, the real one and not the ones invented by gender studies profs, is addressed, but the litany of excuses for failing to do something about it has been elevated from rationalizations for otherwise inexplicable neglect to perfectly normal, acceptable, even laudable, post-crime behaviors.

Whether Chaz’s allegations are true may never be known, since it’s a swearing contest at this point. Rather than spend capital on persuading society that the excuses for failing to report crimes immediately are totally understandable, Chaz’s rapists might have been stopped after their first rape and the next two wouldn’t have happened.

There is no good excuse for encouraging crime to go unreported. You can either put your efforts into crying for Chaz or helping Chaz to not be raped by not crafting excuses for failure to report crimes immediately, and failure to report crimes to the people who can actually do something about them. We don’t need more tears or hysteria. We need to stop making excuses for ineffective reactions to real crimes. Do it for the children. Do it for Chaz.