PENNSYLVANIA
The Morning Call
Bill White
5:01 p.m. EST, January 9, 2012
The alleged child sex abuse victims of Hall of Fame baseball writer Bill Conlin weren’t the only ones who came forward in the wake of the Penn State scandal.
The day one of my columns on this subject appeared, I got a phone call from a man in his 80s. He told me about his being abused when he was a young teenager — and said this was the first time he had told that story to anyone. Even his wife didn’t know about it.
If the scandal at Penn State has any positive result, it will be the way in which it has helped lift the curtain of silence from the subject of child sex abuse and emboldened more victims to finally speak up about what happened to them. I suspect the Conlin accusations have had a similar effect.
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary Unfortunately, one thing many of these victims had in common was that they never would have the opportunity to confront their abusers in court, because Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations was protecting their tormentors. Conlin’s celebrity made the claims of his alleged victims newsworthy enough to warrant stories even without legal filings to back them up, but the court system ordinarily provides the only avenue to pursue the closure of publicly naming and punishing the people who prey on children.
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