Legislation can’t force victims to move on

Tag: usa

By CHRIS POWELL For The Norwich Bulletin

Why has the General Assembly declined to pass legislation extending 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, 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.

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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, 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 was written to apply precisely — if not exclusively — to dozens of people who claim to have been molested as children by a doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford. Many of the former patients brought suit after a cache of pornography was found; 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 is 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, or how many 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. The government cannot afford for the hospital to go out of business or to become critically insolvent.

The evidence so far is not that the hospital was particularly negligent. In response to complaints, the state medical examining board suspended the doctor’s license in 1993, and he stopped working at the hospital. In 1995, the board obtained his agreement to stop practicing medicine and he retired.

While the cache found in the doctor’s former house removes any doubt about him, the burgeoning cult of the victim is a problem here, too. For as awful as the betrayals of trust, any damage to those who were abused is, in the end, not physical but psychological.

Whether it is a life-altering crime is for its victims to decide, and society does them no favors by suggesting that they should consider themselves damaged forever.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.

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