UNITED STATES
Love, Joy, Feminism
July 6, 2016 by Libby Anne
I converted to Catholicism in college. I had grown up in an evangelical home, and Catholicism offered me a new way to view the Bible and gave me a sense of history and richness. In a turbulent time for me, it allowed me to retain my faith. Today, I am no longer religious, but this is not the fault of the Church. Rather, a series of unrelated events shook my fundamental belief in the supernatural. Still, I’ve always retained some affinity for the Catholic tradition. This affinity serves as the backdrop for my increasing disappointment with how the church is handling child sexual abuse and reforms designed to protect children.
I didn’t become a Catholic until several years after the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal first broke in 2002. I didn’t really look into it at the time, or when I converted. I assumed the Catholic Church had made some mistakes—as many intuitions have over the years—and that it had paid for those mistakes and fixed its policies. I was under the impression that child sexual abuse would be taken seriously by the Church going forward, and that its policies had been updated and corrected. Or perhaps I just wanted to believe this—or needed to. Over the past several months, though, I’ve increasingly become convinced that I was wrong, and that children growing up in the Catholic Church today may be no more safe than those growing up in the Catholic Church decades ago.
If you are a victim of child sexual abuse in New York State, you have until age 23 to file a lawsuit against your abuser. That’s it. You can’t decide, at age 24, that you’re finally at a place where you feel like you can report and prosecute your abuser. You can’t decide, at age 37, that you need to make sure your abuser doesn’t hurt other children. This is called a “statute of limitations,” and while New York State has one of the shortest, many other states have strongly curtailed statute of limitations for child sexual abuse as well. Victims’ rights groups have been working for some time to enact statute of limitation reform, but when doing so they’ve frequently been blocked by an important lobby—the Catholic Church—which has spent millions lobbying against statute of limitations reform.
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