PORTLAND (ME)
Portland Press-Herald
July 14, 2019
By the Editorial Board
It’s not willful blindness that keeps sexual abuse victims from speaking up, and Judge Lance Walker should know better.
It’s been 16 years since The Boston Globe exposed widespread sexual abuse and a culture of coverup within the Roman Catholic Church. Since then, sex assault scandals involving the U.S. military, universities, Hollywood, Congress and a wide array of businesses have reinforced the same two points:
Sexual predators take advantage of people who are less powerful than they are. And they hide in organizations that want to protect their own reputations.
A victim’s relatively low social status, combined with a reasonable expectation of backlash from a threatened institution, makes it difficult for them to tell their story, especially if they are children or were children at the time of their abuse.
It’s not only easy to understand why many child sex abuse victims don’t come forward right away, it but should almost be expected that they won’t, which is why many states including Maine have eliminated the statute of limitations for criminal charges of sexual abuse of a child. By now everyone should know this, but unfortunately, that’s not the case.
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