Sweeping under the carpet certainly occured then as now...perhaps even more so in certain crimes like child abuse (but I'm just going by my own family's experience and anecdotal stories). My great-great grandfather was the epitome of the Victorian pater familias...prosperous and highly respected. He had a property in the country and a huge house in "town", in the then fashionable area of Strathfield. During much of the year his unmarried sisters lived there, vacating it for their brother and his mistress when they came for a visit. As outwardly conforming to religious and social norms as anyone else, they were willing to turn a blind eye because of his wealth and respectability.
Worse still, it was only as an adult I found out he abused my grandmother as a little girl. I grew up thinking she had a rather dirty imagination, because I was such a sheltered child and couldn't understand why she was so suspicious of the motives of any adult male around us, even strangers on the street. Then I found out that not only had she been abused, my mother had suffered the advances of a priest while she was attending a Catholic boarding school, and my father and his twin sister had been abused by one of their father's best friends, a man he trusted implicitly (when he found out, years later, apparently it was one of the few times my dad ever saw my grandfather weep).
You look at the explotation of some of the children (not all, I hasten to add - many I've met over the course of research have nothing but respect and affection for the institutions and individuals that took them in) who were sent out from England to resettle here, particularly in the immediate post-war period. Many were treated as slave labour and abused in terrible ways. Same with some of the orphanages run by the state and religious institutions. It was only quite recently that these stories have come out.
Shame often reflected on the victim (something which still hasn't been eradicated). When Louise Brooks tried to tell her mother about being abused, her mother asked her what she'd done to provoke "that nice man" (in fact, the "nice man" had lured the child into his house with candy.
I found "Dad" and called him and he came and picked it up and he was thrilled. It would have been so easy for her to do the same - most people have "Home" or "Mum" or "Dad" so it's not like splitting the atom or anything. Her actions told me everything I needed to know about her......
