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	Bill Seeks to Extend Statute of Limitations for Child Sex Abuse Cases By Joel Mccord WYPR February 12, 2009 http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wypr/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1466742 [with audio] Senator Delores Kelley, the Baltimore County Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the measure, says that at the age of 25 many sex abuse victims are still dependent on their abusers, or that that they are afraid of stigmatizing their families if they complain. And some of them are still in a state of denial. "I'm a retired college professor, and I have had so many young people who could barely function in college because they still were carrying guilt; the perpetrators had made them feel that they were the ones who were responsible for what occurred. And so they disassociate, they deny in order to just make it from day to day." Many people, she says, don't even realize what happened to them until they are in their 30s and 40s. "They need to mature, they need to try to get to a point of stability where they can feel, if they want to, that to aid their healing they can meet their perpetrator in a court of law and feel that there had been some justice and that a court had validated their pain." This is the second time Kelley has moved to extend the statute of limitations on civil sex abuse cases. In 2003, lawmakers agreed to move the deadline from age from three years after a victim reaches "the age of majority" or 18 to the current seven years. She says that child abuse is like rape, a "grossly underreported" crime. "The very reasons that we need to extend the statute of limitations further is that it takes so long for people some time to get up the nerve to face families, to face other perpetrators, to let the world know the pain and suffering and the violence that they have gone through." Vicky Polin, founder of The Awareness Center, an international Jewish coalition against sexual abuse and assault, says she doesn't know old she was when the abuse started in her home in Chicago, just that it had always been there. When she spoke out about it, she was cut off from her family. No one would talk to her until two years ago, at the age of 47, she contacted an aunt she hadn't seen in 25 years. "When we were having this conversation she told me that she was ordered not to talk to me or she would be cut out of the family too until the statute of limitations was up in Illinois." She said she spent 25 years without knowing she had an aunt that loved her. She was homeless and at one point lived in a car. "I had no place to go; I was nobody's child. And to this day I'm still nobody's child. That's what happens when you're an incest survivor." But leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, stung by the priest sex abuse scandals, objected. Sean Cain, communications director for the arch diocese of Baltimore, argued that the bill doesn't protect children, but encourages delayed reporting. "Some people know about it, but if they realize that they've got forever to deal with it maybe they just choose a later time in life to deal with it, figuring that if the do want that recourse to try and sue civilly it's there for them and maybe they don't have to deal with it." The church, he said, has gone out of its way to deal with the sex abuse scandal, requiring criminal background checks for all employees of the archdiocese and setting up training programs. And such a law would place an unbearable financial burden on the church. Since California passed a similar law nearly two billion dollars in judgment have been levied against the Catholic Church. "You can't have that kind of a financial impact without it seriously jeopardizing, threatening, if not altogether shutting down programs and ministries. There is no way that the church in Maryland could sustain those kinds of law suits." Yet Delaware passed a similar law two years ago. Karen Peterson, the senator who sponsored that bill, said in a letter to the committee that no Catholic schools or churches have closed, no programs have been shut down and no organization has been forced into bankruptcy since then. Cain said that's only because the law suits 34 of them, all against Catholic parishes in Delaware--are only now being filed.
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