Albany, Pass the Child Victims Act
If
the #MeToo movement of the last few months has taught us anything, it’s
that it is extremely painful and risky for victims of sexual harassment
or assault — even those with power, money and connections — to speak
out against their abusers. Now consider how much harder it must be for a
child.
It
should surprise no one that a vast majority of people who were sexually
abused as children never report it. For those who do, it takes years,
and often decades, to recognize what happened to them, realize it wasn’t
their fault and tell someone. The trauma leads to higher rates of
alcoholism and drug abuse, depression, suicide and other physical and
psychological problems that cost millions or billions to treat — money
that should be paid not by taxpayers, but by the offenders and the
institutions that cover for them.
For
these reasons, many states — including eight last year alone — have
done the right thing and extended or eliminated statutes of limitations
for the reporting of child sexual abuse. This has encouraged more
victims to come forward and seek justice for abuse that was never
properly addressed, if it was addressed at all.
New
York, which has had no shortage of child sex-abuse scandals, should be
on that list. In fact, it should be leading the nation on this issue.
Instead it, along with Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Michigan, is
one of the states with the least victim-friendly reporting laws in the
country. New York requires most child sex-abuse victims to sue by the
age of 23, 19 years before the average age at which such victims report
their abuse.
Lawmakers have had the solution in their hands for more than a decade. The Child Victims Act
would extend the statute of limitations to age 50 in civil cases, and
to age 28 in criminal cases. It would also establish a one-year window
in which anyone would be permitted to bring a lawsuit, even if the
statute of limitations had already expired.
The
bill enjoys widespread and bipartisan support in Albany — it passed the
State Assembly once again in 2017, by a vote of 139 to 7 — and from
Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And yet it keeps failing to become law.
Why? The Senate majority leader, John Flanagan,
a Republican, has refused to let the bill come to the floor for a vote.
The bill’s opponents, which include the Catholic Church, Orthodox
Jewish groups and the Boy Scouts of America, are concerned primarily
with the one-year window, which they believe would cause a wave of
claims that could drive churches, schools and hospitals into bankruptcy.
That hasn’t happened in other states, even those that opened the window
for longer. In Minnesota, which created a three-year window for a
population a little more than a quarter of New York’s, just under 1,000
civil claims have been filed.
But
even if it did, we should be less concerned with protecting the bank
accounts of institutions that might harbor sexual predators, and more
concerned with bringing justice to the victims — whether their abusers
are clergy members, teachers or, as in a majority of cases, a family
member.
The
Child Victims Act should have passed on its merits long ago. Since it
hasn’t, Mr. Cuomo needs to step up and demonstrate the leadership he has
shown on many other divisive issues in recent years, like same-sex
marriage. If Mr. Cuomo includes the bill’s provisions in the 2018-19
state budget, which he is scheduled to present on Tuesday, he will make
it extremely tough for Mr. Flanagan and other Republican leaders to say
no to protecting New York’s most vulnerable victims.