Doing right thing for abuse victims

As Yogi Berra would say, it’s déjà vu all over again. The advocates for sex-abuse victims are back in Harrisburg, lobbying the Legislature to eliminate statutes of limitations for both civil suits and criminal prosecutions against those institutions and persons who violated the innocence of children.

They tried this last session, with mixed results. The House of Representatives pushed forward HB 1947, a bill that would have made it possible to sue abusers until the victim’s 50th birthday, with a retroactivity component and a standard of culpability that many experts viewed as unconstitutional because it had an unfair impact on private institutions as opposed to public ones. I wrote about last year’s debate in this column, and made the following observation:

“HB 1947 has a disparate and prejudicial impact on private institutions, the vast majority of which happen to be Catholic schools.

While the bill provides for opening the window on civil claims by 20 years, raising the age by which you need to sue from 30 to 50, this will have no impact on public institutions because of sovereign immunity, which actually makes it next to impossible to sue a public institution.

“To be successful in a suit against a public school, you need to show ‘gross negligence.’ That’s not the case in the private sector that, surprise, has the deeper pockets. ... Let me put this another way. The House has just passed legislation that will make it next to impossible for a child who was abused by Coach Joe to obtain justice, while it has made it much easier for the victim of Father Joe to sue, and win. Since there are a lot more Coach Joes who abused children than Father Joes, it doesn’t seem fair, or just, or logical.”

Fortunately, that piece of horrifically flawed legislation was shot down.

But as I said before, it’s Yogi Berra time. The Legislature is back at it, this time with a proposed bill that would level the playing field, strip most of the sovereign immunity protections from the public institutions (where, statistically, most of the abuse has occurred) and not single out the Catholic Church and other private institutions (but let’s be clear, here, the church has the target on her back) for disparate treatment and disproportionate punishment.

Last week, a key House committee broadened the existing bill to remove the damages caps and expose public institutions like high schools to lawsuits where, before, they were protected by sovereign immunity.

State Rep. Rick Saccone, a Republican from Allegheny County, believes the removal of the caps on damages and the lowering of proof standards for civil suits against public agencies will hurt the taxpayers: “I think we should concentrate on going after the perpetrators and make them as accountable as humanly possible … the highest offense, the most egregious act that someone could commit, is these types of things, and I think they should be held personally accountable, not the taxpayer.”

The truth is that this was never really about holding abusers accountable.

This was, in large part, grand theater to attack a very visible institution with crosses all over it, an institution that made terrible mistakes in the past, committed crimes generations ago, and has done more than any other organization to make amends.

A lot of people don’t like to hear that kind of talk. We are not supposed to defend the church because that means we are somehow complicit in these evil acts that occurred, in so many cases, before many of the people reading this column were even born.

If abuse is so horrible, and if people are to be held accountable, it shouldn’t matter if the money comes from the taxpayer or the person in the pew (who, as we all know, is also a taxpayer). To pretend otherwise is rank hypocrisy.

It will be interesting to see what happens this time around the baseball diamond.

I’m hoping that the people who purport to care about children will put aside their petty differences and do the right thing, instead of the politically popular thing. But I’m not holding my breath.

Because as Yogi also said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”