CALIFORNIA
First Things
Monday, September 16, 2013
Greg Forster
California is about to open a litigation “window” that temporarily allows victims of sex abuse for whom the statute of limitations has run out to sue the employers of their abusers. The prime target is of course the Roman Catholic Church, with the Boy Scouts also on the radar. Over on NRO, Kevin Williamson notes that California is exempting its own government-run public schools from liability to these lawsuits, even though the available data strongly indicate that rates of sex abuse in public schools are much higher than in churches or any other institution:
In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone some 600 teachers over a four-year period were fired, have resigned, or were facing sanctions because of “inappropriate conduct” relating to students. The lumping of cases together somewhat obscures things: About 60 teachers faced punishment for outright sexual relations with students (or other minors), while others were punished for offenses such as showing pornography to students, forcing students to act out “master and slave” sexual role-play scenarios, taking a student on a field trip to a sex shop, lining girls up in the classroom to judge their relative breast size before having them do jumping jacks, and old-fashioned sexual harassment.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.