NEW YORK
Newsday
Updated May 15, 2017
By Marci A. Hamilton and Kathryn Robb
THE BOTTOM LINE
* New York State needs to extend its too-short statutes of limitations.
New York is among the worst states in the United States for justice for child sex-abuse victims. That is because its statutes of limitations are prohibitively short.
While much of the country was expanding statutes of limitations in the past 25 years, New York has stood still. Victims must sue the perpetrator by age 23 and a responsible institution by age 21. There is no limit for the victim who seeks to press charges for rape but for most other child sex crimes, the victim has until the age of 23. These time periods are too short.
New York’s statute creates groups of victims:
Group 1: This includes those whose claims have expired — the vast majority of the state’s victims.
Group 2: This includes children who are being sexually assaulted now, so their claims are still live, but odds are that they will be unable to press charges or sue before the statute expires. It takes most victims into their 30s, 40s and 50s before they are ready to come forward. Some never do.
Group 3: This is the largest, and it includes the New York public, which knows less about existing child predators than most every other state in the country. Only Alabama, Michigan, and Mississippi statute of limitations laws are as bad.
The average citizen may ask, quite fairly, what takes these victims so long to come forward? The answer: It is the way the brain processes trauma, or, rather, what happens when it can’t. It’s no good blaming a victim for not coming forward when he or she can’t; the predator has paralyzed the voice of the victim.
Simply, sexual predators cause harm that leads to silence and confusion — and New York law punishes the victims for the silence and trauma predators caused, and that leads to more harm. This is a vicious cycle in which predators are the only winners.
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