Pennsylvania lawmakers seek reform of child sexual abuse laws
HARRISBURG, Pa |
HARRISBURG, Pa (Reuters) - Two Pennsylvania lawmakers said on Monday in the wake of the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State University they would propose legal reforms to give abuse victims more time to press claims in civil court.
The proposed reforms would also make witnesses of child abuse legally obligated to report it to authorities, not merely to a supervisor, state Representative Dennis O'Brien said.
"As a result of these recent events at Penn State, child abuse survivors are seeking -- and needing -- an opportunity to share their experiences and to have them validated," O'Brien said at a hearing by the House Children and Youth Committee, which he chairs.
At Penn State, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, 67, was charged in November with multiple counts of sexually abusing eight young boys over a 15-year period. Sandusky has denied he abused the boys.
Another coach, then a graduate student, had told head coach Joe Paterno in 2002 that he had seen Sandusky having sex with a boy in an on-campus shower, according to a grand jury report. Paterno, in turn, told his boss.
The board of trustees fired Paterno and Penn State's president for failing to tell police about an allegation of abuse once they learned of it.
Under the proposed reform, victims of child abuse and child sexual abuse would have until they are 50 years old to press a civil suit, O'Brien said.
Currently victims have until they are 50 to press criminal charges but only until they are 30 years old for civil suits.
The proposed reform also would create a two-year window to revive cases in which the statute of limitations has expired, he said.
Similar reforms were adopted in Delaware in the Child Victim's Act of 2007 which eliminated the civil statute of limitations on sexual abuse and allows a two-year window to file civil suits for victims for whom the statute of limitations had passed.
Under the Delaware law, 14 men who said they were sexually assaulted as children in the 1970s and 1980s announced last week they reached a $7 million settlement with three Catholic church institutions that employed and supervised their predators.
O'Brien, a Republican, said he and Democratic committee chairman Louise Bishop would introduce the proposed changes in the Pennsylvania legislature.
Several victims of child sexual abuse who became advocates for legal reform testified before the committee, as did attorney Marci Hamilton who represents one of the alleged victims in the Sandusky case.
(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Cynthia Johnston)
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Sister Maureen Paul Turlish SNDdeN
Advocate for Victims & Legislative Reform
maturlishmdsnd@yahoo.com
Pennsylvania and New York both have an uphill battle to get any legislation having to do with the sexual abuse of children discussed let alone signed into law regardless of what’s been happening lately at Penn State, Syracuse or any other educational or religious institution.
This is especially true if Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput and New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan have anything to do with it.
Both churchmen along with their respective state Catholic Conferences have drawn lines in the sand in their continuing attempts to avoid the accountability and transparency the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed upon in 2002 to say nothing of the right everyone has to access justice through the judicial process in these United States.
Especially significant are the remarks Archbishop Dolan made to reporters during the November meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, MD. Archbishop Dolan who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops compared the widening sex abuse scandal at Penn State University to the decades’ long crisis in the Roman Catholic Church as if the latter were a thing of the past.
Actually the archbishop misspoke when he said that the present Penn State sexual abuse scandal “over a former football coach accused of sexually abusing young boys ‘reopens a wound’ for the U.S. Roman Catholic Church.”
The “wound” Dolan refers to never closed. It is a “wound” that has continued to fester since the Archdiocese of Boston, Massachusetts imploded in 2002 and the massive cover-up by the hierarchy was exposed there. It is an open festering wound in places like the Archdiocese of Philadelphia where the criminal trial of Msgr. William Lynn and four others begins in March of 2012. It festers too in Missouri where Bishop Robert Finn has been criminally charged for not reporting the pornography found on a priest’s computer as required by law.
Why does this “wound” remain open after ten years?
Well for one thing the bishops of the United States have never really admitted, individually or collectively, to their part in covering up for clergymen known to have sexually exploited children, young people and vulnerable adults while failing miserably to protect the most precious of their charges – the children.
Yes, the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has “a long way to go,” to use Dolan’s words, in making up for the egregious crimes that have been committed against children but “failures” and “mistakes” are words that do not begin to describe the agony thousands of children were left to go through while the few adults who dared to confront pastors or bishops over the behavior of rogue priests were bullied, harassed and intimidated into silence, often with threats of eternal damnation and of course, counter-suits.
These were crimes against the very humanity of children for whom there was no recourse to justice in the majority of cases because of grossly inadequate statutes of limitation in most states regarding their sexual abuse.
Archbishop Dolan offered to work with “Penn State administrators on a national education campaign to stop abuse.”
Does Dolan imagine that the Roman Catholic Church has cornered the market or set some kind of a gold standard in regard to either confronting the incidence of sexual abuse by clerics or the orchestrated cover-up by Episcopal leadership that followed?
It has not.
On Monday, Dec. 5th, Pennsylvania Representative Dennis O’Brien convened an informational meeting of the House Children and Youth Committee of which he is the majority chairman. Along with Rep. Louise Bishop who made public her own sexual abuse some weeks ago, O’Brien heard from eight individuals including victims, a deceased victim’s parent, advocates, a former deputy district attorney from Philadelphia, now a senior prosecutor in Lehigh County and a constitutional lawyer and author from New York.
http://repobrien.com/NewsItem.aspx?NewsID=13093
Rep. O’Brien made known his intentions to introduce a package of five bills to protect children –– House Bills 2046 through 2050 – some sections of which repeat portions of House Bills 832 and 878 which were introduced on March 1st, 2011 before the revelations of the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State became public.
What the scandals at Penn State, Syracuse and elsewhere make clear is that while the cover-up of sexual abuse by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church was widespread, systemic and peculiar to one denomination, the sexual abuse itself was not.
The question now is how can the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church ethically or morally justify its opposition to legislation that would better protect all children while holding sexual predators and their enablers accountable, regardless of any religious affiliation?
Through its bishops and state Catholic Conferences, the Roman Catholic Church is the most powerful institution opposing better child protection legislation in this country, bar none, and Archbishop Dolan has been very vocal in his opposition to any proposed legislation in the state of New York that has sought to hold sexual predators and their enablers accountable.
In seeking to shield the Roman Catholic Church from the accountability and transparency it was forced to promise in 2002, such opposition gives more protection to sexual predators whether they are parents, ministers, priests, imams, rabbis, doctors or coaches at a university like Syracuse or Penn State.
In opposing legislative reform in New York, Dolan is not unlike Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput, his opposite number in Pennsylvania, who at this very moment, has united with the bishops of Pennsylvania and the PA Catholic Conference to oppose any legislation that would enable victim/survivors of childhood sexual abuse to access justice, no matter when they were sexually exploited or by whom.
Archbishops Dolan and Chaput, along with most of their fellow bishops, haven’t a clue as to the suffering that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church’s has caused and continues to inflict on sexual abuse victims because they have never been truly accountable or transparent.
No one in the Catholic community has suffered more than the innocent children whose minds, hearts and souls were torn asunder by those who stood in the place of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Baltimore’s former archbishop, Cardinal William Keeler correctly described such horrific sexual abuse by a trusted minister of God when he used the term “soul murder” for it truly is that.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, should be at the head of the parade in advocating for the removal of all criminal and civil statutes of limitation in regard to the sexual abuse of children but he isn’t heading that parade and neither is Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.
This kind of reprehensible behavior should be morally and ethically repugnant to all.
Sister Maureen Paul Turlish SNDdeN
This is one for sure way to get a handle on stopping innocent kids being sexually abused. Children are not any safer today, because the laws are very predator friendly.
Judy Jones, SNAP Midwest Associate Director, USA 636-433-2511
snapjudy@gmail.com
“Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests” and all clergy.
http://www.snapnetwork.org/
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