NEW YORK
Village Voice
New York State Republicans, Boy Scouts, and the Catholic Church
by LAUREN EVANS
JUNE 5, 2017
When Ana Wagner was nine years old, she was sexually abused by her father’s best friend, starting a pattern that would repeat for the next three years. It’s been two decades, but she still has trouble talking about it.
“I was a very nerdy little nine-year-old,” she told the Voice, exhaling shakily. “And puny. I was the shortest in my school for my grade.” Twenty years went by before Wagner summoned the strength to report her abuser to police, marching into a precinct house to file a report. But by then it was too late.
At that point, Wagner was thirty-two. As it stands, New York State law gives victims only until the age of twenty-three — five years after their eighteenth birthday — to either bring criminal charges or file a suit. While most other states gradually pushed back their statutes of limitations, New York never did, making its policies among the most restrictive in the country.
A typical sex offender molests an average of 117 children in his or her lifetime, according to a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The idea that Wagner’s abuser is still out there, hurting other children, haunts her every day. “That guilt, I live with it, because I’m just one,” she said. “So there’s, like, 116 other people. Maybe I could have prevented 100.”
Wagner is a forceful proponent of the Child Victims Act, a bill first proposed in 2006 that she and many others are desperately hoping will pass the state’s legislature before its session ends on June 21.
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