HARRISBURG (PA)
Penn Live
August 31, 2018
By Michael Dolce
The eyes of the world turned again earlier this month to the horrors of child sexual abuse after the release of a 900-page report that uncovered decades of abuse and cover up in the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.
These horrific allegations are sadly not the first and unlikely to be the last. To deepen the injustice, many of the more than 1,000 victims identified by the Catholic Church’s own records will never get their day in court, and many of the 300 predator priests who perpetrated these crimes in the state will never be held accountable.
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself and an attorney who now represents victims of these crimes, I can say without doubt that Pennsylvania and other states’ arbitrary statutes of limitations on child sexual abuse only further harm victims and enable predators to continue their abuse.
For survivors of child sexual abuse, the average time for reporting these crimes is 15 years; it took me 20 years to finally speak out about my own abuse.
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