NEW YORK
Spectrum News
By Geoff Redick
Updated Tuesday, May 9, 2017
ALBANY, N.Y. — If you can call it luck, then Kat Sullivan is one of the “lucky” ones.
Sullivan is a rape survivor, which means in New York State she can seek criminal prosecution against her attacker whenever she pleases — even 20 years after the rape, which happened in 1998 on the campus of the Emma Willard School in Troy, where Sullivan attended as a student athlete.
But potentially, hundreds of teenage girls who attended Emma Willard School, like Sullivan did, were the victims of sexual abuse. Such abuse is considered different from forcible rape under the state’s legal definition. Because of a statute of limitations preventing legal action after five years have passed, those hundreds of girls cannot report the crimes against them with any hope of confronting their attackers.
Children who are victimized younger than the age of 13 can report sex abuse at any time for the rest of their lives, leaving only minors between the ages of 13 and 18 as those who must tell authorities within five years.
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