With just a couple weeks until the start of 2024’s legislative session, New York lawmakers announced a package of bills on Tuesday expanding on recent measures that made it easier for sexual assault survivors to seek justice.
The proposals include:
- Eliminating the deadline for civil lawsuits for many child sex crimes.
- Suspending the statute of limitations for a set amount of time, similar to the Adult Survivors Act, for survivors of sex trafficking to file civil lawsuits against people they say trafficked them.
- Preventing people accused of sexual misconduct from mentioning in civil court their accuser’s past sexual behavior or what they were wearing during an alleged assault. Similar protections already exist for criminal sex abuse cases.
- Providing extra time for incarcerated people to file sexual assault lawsuits after their release from jail or prison.
- Requiring doctors convicted of sexual offenses or the institutions that employed them to notify patients about allegations against them.
State Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal said the measures reflect a growing understanding among both lawmakers and members of the public about the time it takes for many sexual abuse survivors to come forward. She called the current statutes of limitations — legal deadlines to bring cases in court — “arbitrary.”
“People’s experiences are varied,” she said. “Some people are ready to go to court the next day, and some people might take 30 years to deal with it.”
Rosenthal said many children who are sexually abused are “harassed into secrecy” and told that no one will believe them if they report what happened to them. She said similar patterns often play out with sex trafficking victims, who may be afraid to speak up or not even realize at first that they have been trafficked.
For patients who have been sexually abused, like the hundreds of women who have accused former Columbia gynecologist Robert Hadden of sexual abuse, Rosenthal said that if they’re not notified…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply