@greenflashlight I'm with you completely re: ensuring the confidentiality of the person making a report.
The one thing to keep in mind with something like this is... well, it's two-fold.
Different games have different structures to their staff, and rarely does one person have the authority to act without consulting another member of staff. Some will only take action about something if the whole group agrees, for example, while others, if you reported the incident to a lowly admin, they are likely going to need to discuss the matter with the headwiz or someone who does have the authority to take action if something further needs to happen.
This is a checks and balances issue; though I agree that 'the fewer involved the better' for confidentiality, some staff corps are just not designed to allow that and you run a real risk of things going much worse if only one staff member ends up handling it solo. Others may have at least one or two others who need to weigh in. That doesn't mean anyone's name goes out to the public, however. The hard part here is that the game does actually have to protect itself, too. Solo staffer action -- especially if it potentially involves removing a player from the game -- can get the rumor mill turning much faster and louder and more viciously than an actual accounting of everything that's fully public (which I agree would already be horrible), and this can end up harming everyone involved, including the person making the report (as men report, too, but as @TNP said, much more rarely -- I'm keeping my pronouns as neutral as possible for a reason), considerably more.
You also have to figure, most complaints and reports are kept fairly confidential. People who are awful tend to accrue a fair number of them, even if it's not in the form of a formal report or complaint with or without logs, though this may not be known to the person making the report this time unless people who have reported things previously tell them so. Staff have usually observed the behavior themselves, too. These patterns are often more valuable to staff than any potentially embarrassing detail or log could ever be. Very rare is the 'huh, this is the first time I've heard anything like this!' about an abusive player, unless that player is very new to the game, staff-side, because even without formal complaints, people do mention these things when they arise, even if it is just in passing, and good staff notice them when they show up on channels, etc.
The other thing is, staff actually is responsible for more than just that person who reports. If what they report having happened is NOT OK on that game, there's really only so much someone can ask to be done. For instance, someone reporting may not be demanding, asking, or even hoping that the offending player be removed from the game, but if the offending player broke the rules and was behaving inappropriately, they should be removed. This doesn't mean digging into anybody's business or prying around, but it does mean there are some limits on what can be asked for. For instance, 'don't ban this person even though they did this' would fall into that 'this could ultimately be unethical' category of requests if what the offender did warrants removal from the game. It would be the same if someone asked for someone to be banned who didn't deserve it, just flipped around -- it would cross an important ethical line that would make the whole game less safe, and the whole game is in the realm of the staff member's responsibility and concern.
You can't, essentially, ask to leave the predator out in the wild to harm others if what they've done would warrant removal from the game. Staff can remove them without exposing who reported. You are very right about one thing: that part is about ensuring there will be no next target of abuse, and that no further abuse from that offender occurs to the reporting party on that game, not about punishing that person for what they did wrong already or about helping the target get back on their feet. But that's a very real and important part of staff's job and responsibility.
Providing care and support is a separate matter entirely. There's really only so much of that staff can do, and ethically speaking, only so much they should. While a lot of us have training and/or personal experience in this area, there aren't a lot of actual therapists or counselors or victim services folk staffing -- and when staffing a game, this isn't typically on the qualifications list. People are usually there for code, for running scenes, etc. (And even the actual qualified folks who do this for a living are not likely to want to do the same, at length, for no paycheck.) The only thing worse than no support is someone who thinks they're being helpful who has no idea what in hell they're talking about, much of the time.
This is where a good RL support network -- or network of supportive friends within the hobby -- comes in, for the most part. It isn't, and can't be, staff's job to make someone whole again after something horrible happens. Staff can be respectful of the target's privacy, and they can listen to what the target wants the resolution to be, but it is ultimately not their responsibility to provide counseling and recovery services after the fact if someone needs them.
We had set it up months earlier paperwork side, but the husband's work only kicks in policies on the 1st of the year, so we were really fucking lucky. I do not even want to think about what would have happened otherwise. (I'd be dead, we'd be completely bankrupt for the rest of our lives, or both.)
What closet?!