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	Chris Powell: They're Victims Forever Only If They Want to Be By Chris Powell Middletown Press May 6, 2010 http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2010/05/06/opinion/doc4be2322a28e20810327829.txt Why has the General Assembly just declined to pass legislation to extend the statute of limitations for damage lawsuits in child sexual abuse cases? Did the bill fail because of fair concerns for civil liberty and due process of law, concerns that a legal defense becomes almost impossible with passage of enough time and that these days almost any complaint of sexual abuse is automatically believed? After all, the current statute allows child sexual abuse lawsuits to be brought until the plaintiff is 48, fully 30 years into adulthood. But who can remember exactly where he was and what he did on a particular day even one year ago? Or did the bill fail because of the intervention of the Catholic Church, which warned legislators and parishioners that changing the law could bankrupt the church, the church long having tolerated so many child molesters among its clergy and already having paid so much in damages with so much more in payments due? The bill wasn't quite the disaster for civil liberty and due process that it might have seemed. For it allowed people 48 and older to sue for sexual abuse suffered as a child only by joining the lawsuit of someone under 48 and only if the older plaintiff could produce documentation of abuse, ensuring that his complaint would be more than a matter of the conflicting testimony of the principals. That is, the bill was written to apply precisely if not exclusively to the dozens of people who claim to have been molested as children by a doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford in whose former home in West Hartford a cache of pornographic photographs and films of themselves and others was discovered three years ago. Many of the doctor's former patients brought suit after the cache of pornography was found, but many others were barred by the statute of limitations. The doctor died nine years prior to the cache's discovery, so the question underlying the legislation has been mainly how many people should get to sue the hospital and share in whatever financial award a court might make if the hospital was found negligent about employing the doctor, or how many people might share in whatever financial settlement the hospital might offer prior to trial. This implied other important public policy issues, though they don't seem to have been discussed much in regard to the legislation. While St. Francis Hospital is an institution of the church, as a practical matter it is also an agency of social welfare used by the government and under the government's close supervision. By law the hospital provides much medical care to people who cannot pay for it and whose expenses are recovered through increased fees to patients who can pay and through government grants. The government cannot afford for the hospital to go out of business or to become critically insolvent. So any large damage awards against the hospital (and against most other public hospitals) eventually will be borne in large part by government. The evidence so far is not that the hospital was particularly negligent in regard to the doctor. At least the hospital's relationship with the doctor once he was accused seems to have been determined largely by state government's own action. In response to complaints that the doctor had molested young patients, the state medical examining board suspended his license in 1993 and he stopped working at the hospital then. In 1995 the board obtained his agreement to stop practicing medicine and he retired. But a formal judgment on his conduct was never rendered and he was never prosecuted criminally. Government itself left the matter ambiguous, perhaps because medical regulation then was, as it is now, assigned largely to doctors themselves, who hold a majority on the regulatory board. While the cache found in the doctor's former house removes any doubt about him, and while the church has lost credibility in regard to sexual abuse and will not regain it with indignant political action, the burgeoning cult of the victim is a problem here, too. For as awful as the betrayals of trust by the doctor and the Catholic clergy and hierarchy have been, any damage to those who were abused is, in the end, not physical but psychological and thus is largely a matter of their choice of attitude. That a doctor or priest physically exploited a young person is surely a horrible crime, but whether it is a life-altering crime, a devastating crime, is for its victims to decide, and society does them no favors by suggesting, as disproportionate statutes of limitations do, that they should consider themselves damaged forever. They may live down to expectations. Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
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