NEW YORK
Gothamist
BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ ON JUN 22, 2017
Keeping with a decade-long tradition, the New York State senate has once again refused to take up a widely-supported bill extending the amount of time that child sexual abuse victims can seek justice as adults. On Wednesday, the senate ended its legislative session by refusing to vote on the Child Victims Act [CVA], despite Governor Cuomo’s repeated promise to survivors that this was the year the legislation would finally pass.
The bill’s failure was the topic of a caustic segment on Wednesday night’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, in which the comedian does her best to understand, “Why have they been blocking this bill for 11 years?”
As State Senator Brad Hoylman notes, the bill would lift New York’s restrictive 5-year civil and criminal statute of limitation on childhood sexual assault, sending a lifeline to the majority of survivors who take years to report their abusers. But according to the Manhattan representative, “Churches, Yeshivas, the Boy Scouts of America, they’re all trying to quash the ability for survivors of child sex abuse to file claims.”
Of those powerful institutions, none has done more to stop the CVA than the Catholic Church. Between 2007 and 2015, the Tim Dolan-led Catholic Conference paid out more than $2.1 million to Albany lobbyists to block the legislation. Meanwhile, Catholic League President Bill Donohue has taunted those pushing for the bill as “losers,” and claimed last year that the act is “a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church.”
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