The bill Senator Young is proposing and that the Senate might actually get to vote on this session is an insult to survivors of childhood sexual abuse and to the intelligence of all New Yorkers. It is a Trojan Horse, poison pill and red herring all rolled into one. Its purpose is not to give survivors the extended denied access to justice they seek but to shift the conversation away from the Republican-controlled Senate’s stonewalling any legitimate Child Victims Act for a dozen years.
For starters, Senator Young’s bill treats survivors differently from all other crime victims by inserting an additional, extra-judicial hurdle for the victims of child sexual abuse. New York State’s court system is good enough for every other crime, why do survivors of this one need a different process, one operating outside the regular judicial system?…
Pope Francis did an amazing thing, for a pope, that is. He declared that the “culture of abuse and cover-up”, as it pertains to the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church, must end. The statement was made in a letter to the Catholics of Chile, where a sex abuse scandal has been on display for the whole world to see unfold.
The same disparity that enables exploitations like this to occur also keeps them from getting exposed. This is how it has always been. Except now the balance of power has shifted. There is strength in numbers and courage inspires yet more courage. The flood is far from over and hopefully will continue until a true shift in society’s passive acceptance of this kind of behavior is finally burned away.
That might as well be what the Republicans have been saying for all the years they’ve blocked the Child Victims Act (“CVA”). Relying on a set of talking points (given them by lobbyists) they stall for time. By acknowledging that justice for survivors is an important issue they are studying, they try to placate activists. Then they qualify it by saying it is a more complicated issue than we imagine. Yet, they assure us, they are actively discussing it in conference and will come up with a solution that is fair to everyone, given enough time to do their job.
As I was listening to the teenagers who so eloquently and passionately spoke at the March For Our Lives today, I realized there are a host of similarities between the efforts to reform gun laws and those to reform statutes of limitation for child sex abuse, especially now that the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who survived the mass shooting last month have elevated the issue in the consciousness of Americans voters….
OMG, you poor thing!
What a miscarriage of justice it would be for the richest & most powerful institution the world has ever known to be forced to make amends for sex crimes against children & covering them up for decades. After moving sexual predators in your employ from one exploited hunting ground to the next unsuspecting one, destroying lives that might have been happily lived but for atrocities committed by so-called men of God, you think you should get a free pass. That is the definition of chutzpah.