UNITED STATES
The Baltimore Sun
By Neil Jaffee
The winds of change are blowing toward justice for childhood abuse survivors.
Childhood sexual abuse survivors who seek legal redress against their perpetrators share a common goal: a fair chance to establish the truth of what was done to them as children. No more, no less. But given the unfairness of our justice system’s disposition of survivor cases, that goal is elusive and too often unattainable. However, in the past several weeks, there have been developments that could advance incrementally the goal of survivors to obtain justice against their abusers.
First, prosecutors in Minnesota recently filed unprecedented criminal charges against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, as a corporation, accusing church leadership of failing to protect children from a known abusive priest. The criminal charges and accompanying civil petition allege that the archdiocese’s repeated mishandling of complaints against the priest was part of an institutional pattern of permitting predatory priests to continue working in the church and having access to children. The criminal charges consist of six misdemeanors, each carrying a maximum fine of $3,000. In other recent cases involving archdioceses, an individual church leader, rather than the entire archdiocese as an institution, was charged with failing to properly supervise abusive priests.
The investigation of the Minnesota archdiocese corroborated evidence arising from numerous civil cases against the archdiocese and priests filed by survivors after the state legislature enacted a law that opened a three-year window for filing lawsuits involving childhood sexual abuse claims that were previously barred by the statute of limitations. This led to official reports of sexual misconduct by priests and produced record evidence against the priests and the church leadership, culminating in the charges against the archdiocese. Only days after the criminal charges were filed, two of the archdiocese’s bishops resigned their posts. (A bill that would have increased the window to file suit in Maryland from seven years to 20 years after the victim turns 18 failed in the legislature this year.)
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.