Adult Child-abuse Victims and Allies Are Fighting to Eliminate the Statute of Limitations

By Rebecca Addison
Pittsburgh City Paper
October 19, 2016

http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/adult-child-abuse-victims-and-allies-are-fighting-to-eliminate-the-statute-of-limitations/Content?oid=1959777

If you look at the legislation that Pennsylvania state Rep. Mark Rozzi has sponsored over the past year, you’ll notice a theme.

In February, Rozzi (D-Berks County) proposed a resolution designating April 2016 as “Sexual Assault Awareness Month.” In March, he co-sponsored a bill to add child sex abuse as an exception to sovereign-immunity laws. And his current fight to pass House Bill 1947 would eliminate the criminal statute of limitation on child sexual-abuse cases.

For Rozzi, sexual assault isn’t just another legislative issue. It’s the reason he ran for office in 2012. Rozzi was molested by an Allentown Diocese priest when he was 13.

After being molested, in the 1980s, Rozzi did his best to move on from the trauma. But he was spurred to take action in 2009 after a second childhood friend committed suicide; both of them had been molested by the same priest.

“When that happened, it triggered something in my life. I just couldn’t function anymore,” Rozzi says. “It came down to continuing where I was or standing up and fighting. I decided I’m going to do what I can, that I would expose my story to help others.”

But Rozzi found there were few resources for victims to expose their abusers. Under current state law, a survivor of child sex abuse that occurred after 2002 has until age 50 to file criminal charges, and until age 30 to initiate a civil suit. For victims like Rozzi, who were abused before 2002, there is no recourse.

“I had two years civilly and five years criminally to come forward. I was 13 years old,” Rizzo says. “Put yourself in my place. Put yourself in that shower. You close your eyes and think for a second — while you’re being raped, you tell me if you know what a statute of limitations is.”

HB 1947 would eliminate time barriers to file criminal and civil cases for those abused after the bill becomes law. Key in this fight is a retroactivity portion of the bill that would give adults today the chance to challenge their abusers from long ago.

But time is of the essence. The last day of Pennsylvania’s legislative session is Oct. 26. If HB 1947 isn’t passed by then, advocates say, it will die.

The legislation is being challenged by a number of state groups like the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference and the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, who say it’s unconstitutional.

“We do share concerns along with the business community and the Pennsylvania Senate about how a retroactive measure will conflict with the Pennsylvania Constitution,” Amy Hill, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, said in a statement.

Supporters of the legislation say the constitutional argument is a smokescreen. They claim groups like the Catholic Conference are opposing the legislation because they could be financially burdened by civil lawsuits.

But for adult victims of child sexual abuse, their fight isn’t about the money; it’s about protecting others. They say too many abusers are allowed to continue hurting children because their victims are too young to understand what is being done to them and to speak out. The key to ending such abuse, they say, is to ensure that victims are given the power to identify their abusers as adults.

“They’ve taken away my right to protect children and that makes me angry,” says Shawn O’Mahony, who was molested as a child. “It’s been very frustrating. And I’m sure my story is just like so many others.”

O’Mahony is a Pittsburgh-area resident who was molested starting at age 10 by a neighbor. As a gay man, he says that as a child he didn’t come forward because his abuser made him feel embarrassed about his sexual orientation and what was being done to him.

“I was molested for years. He tried to make me feel inferior,” says O’Mahony. “At that point in time, there were people making statements that gays and child molesters are the same. This is how it was back then.”

It took O’Mahony years to have the courage to come forward, but by then the statute of limitations had passed. At age 49, he says, he’s seen his abuser interacting with other children for years and believes they are being molested. For years he has notified police of his concerns, but says his worries have not been taken seriously.

“I’ve seen children being abused without being able to help them over the years,” says O’Mahony. “I’ve seen people in adulthood who had been molested for years by this person who overdosed on drugs. I’ve just watched this over the years and no one believed me.”

O’Mahony says his abuser’s actions went unchecked until evidence emerged that the man, who worked for decades as a teacher, was sending sexually explicit text messages to a student. He pled guilty to child-endangerment charges and was sentenced to seven years’ probation. O’Mahony was barred from getting involved in the case because he could be sued for defamation for any comments he made about the man.

“I’m not allowed to have any freedom of speech, any right to protect myself, any right to call attention to something bad to help other kids be protected,” says O’Mahony. “At this point, I’ve gone through lots of years of therapy. It affects you for the rest of your life. That is what’s being done to these children. They’re afraid, they don’t know where to turn to, no one believes them.”

That’s why the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse has been working on this issue for 12 years. The group says that HB 1947 will give victims the ability to prevent more children from being abused, in part by extending the deadline for filing civil suits to age 50.

“This bill will not help me in anyway. I’m almost 70,” says Marie Whitehead, communications coordinator for The Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, who was abused as a child. “For people 50 or under, some of their perpetrators are still out there, and because they couldn’t be charged and they couldn’t be named in a civil lawsuit, a victim cannot get up in public and say ‘so-and-so abused me.’ They could be sued themselves and in other states some perps have done that. There’s no way to identify them.”

According to Whitehead, the opposition to the bill from groups like the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Catholic Conference is purely financial.

“It’s just about the money for them. They don’t have any high moral ground here,” says Whitehead. “In other states where this was passed, payments for settlements in civil suits have been shared by [the party] and their insurance company.”

Whitehead says abuse survivors often need a lot of resources for things like therapy due to declining coverage for mental health around the country. But the potential for monetary awards from civil suits isn’t why she and many others are fighting to see the legislation passed.

“At their core, most survivors just don’t want anyone else to go through this and will do anything they can do to help prevent that, as they’re strong enough,” says Whitehead. “And a lot of them aren’t strong enough to get up in front of the media or even speak out at a support group. There’s such shame. So, the few of us who can, we do.”

When it was originally proposed, HB 1947 did not include the retroactive portion of the legislation. Rozzi amended the bill to include it and it was passed in the house by a vote of 180 to 15.

But when the legislation went to the senate, the retroactivity portion was eliminated due to pressures from the opposition groups.

Advocates say the retroactive portion is what will prevent abusers from hurting more children, but it’s this portion of the bill that lobbyists oppose.

A letter signed by the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Business Council, Pennsylvania National Federation of Independent Businesses and Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association outlines the reason some oppose the bill.

“Retroactively extending the statute of limitations is a dangerous precedent for any business that manufactures, sells, stores or transports any kind of product, as well as for any institution that is an insurer or creditor of any such business. The General Assembly should not increase the risks of doing business by changing the rules retroactively. If the General Assembly crosses this threshold, the costs and problems for businesses and insurers will increase — not just because of this bill, but because of the precedent it sets to ignore the constitutionality of other statutes of limitations,” the letter says.

Now the bill returns to the House rules committee, where Rozzi says he will again amend it to include language to make the change in the statute of limitations retroactive. The representative says he will not compromise.

“People are trying to tell me I have to accept the deal, that we aren’t going to get any more, that I have to accept a half a loaf for the children of the commonwealth that only helps future victims,” says Rozzi. “My message is I will never compromise the children of this commonwealth ever. If we’re going to help one section, we’re going to help all sections —past, present and future.”

This year, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office released a 147-page report on a years-long investigation into clergy sexual abuse within the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. The report details the stories of hundreds of children abused by about 50 priests.

For Shaun Dougherty, another Pennsylvanian molested as a child, the report shows just why Rozzi’s bill is needed.

“Before I really knew and everything sunk in about what happened to me, before I really came of age to figure out I could do something, the statue of limitations had run out on me,” says Dougherty. “Now that we have the attorney general’s report, we know that my scenario has played out countless times.”