Our community, its administrators, and its leaders are also much more mature than they were 9 years ago. Asking 13 year old HEM to handle a harassment investigation? Perhaps we were in a position to handle these sorts of issues sooner than now, but our community is a much different (more open and more supportive) place than it was or could have expected to be all those years ago. There was no one capable of dealing with something like this who also had the power to take action.
I don't disagree that in an ideal world we would have addressed this sooner, whether 9 years ago or last year, but when your community leadership consists of naive young players, that's asking an awful lot of people with very little life experience. Even some of the victims may not have realized that what they were experiencing was harassment, or even that it was wrong.
When I first started out a number of years ago, I had an experience with an older male player that today I would 100% call inappropriate, harassment, and possibly even illegal. But then, that didn't even cross my mind. I was young, and rather than trying to deal with it, I just laughed it off, ignored it, and hoped that it would go away. I'm not sure I even knew that I could do anything. I certainly don't think the leaders of the region I was in at the time (not Europeia) would have been prepared to deal with such allegations. I'm not sure when I became aware of harassment, or that what I experienced was harassment, but I know when I was 15 it just seemed like something I had to deal with on my own.
Fortunately, we are blessed today with a more open environment for these sorts of issues both in our region and in our (real) world, and we had people who took the problem seriously and worked hard to resolve it. I just don't think we were in that position way back when.