Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 5, 1994 TAG: 9411070041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Tuesday's election is about more than Ollie or Chuck or Marshall.
It's also about extending legal protection for victims of child abuse, the Coalition for Amendment No.1 says.
The coalition - whose members include state Sen. Joseph Gartlan Jr., D-Fairfax County; Vivian Watts, former state secretary of public safety and transportation; Sylvia Clute, a Richmond lawyer who sought the Democratic candidacy in this year's U.S. Senate race; and 14 medical, legal, psychiatric, civic and child advocacy organizations - has promoted passage of Amendment No.1.
"The importance of this is, it ties up a loose end and makes this kind of offense more on an equal footing with other types of offenses," said Watts, herself a victim of child abuse. "The lifelong effects of child abuse are very real to society.
"This is an important part of the whole platform that needs to be built to protect society from the effects of abuse."
State law now sets a two-year limit on filing a lawsuit to recover damages from any personal injury. If the victim was a child when the injury occurred, the two-year period starts at age 18 and continues to age 20.
In 1991, the General Assembly, responding to testimony that victims of childhood abuse may not remember the abuse or understand how the abuse has affected them until they are older, amended the law. The amendment permitted victims to file a lawsuit up to age 28 and within two years of the date they discovered, with the help of a physician or psychologist, how past abuse may have hurt them.
In 1992, the Virginia Supreme Court held that the revision violated the state constitution. The court ruled that the General Assembly could change the time limits for future cases but that it could not do so for cases of past abuse.
The proposed Amendment No.1 adds a provision that would allow the General Assembly to revise the time limits for filing civil lawsuits involving past "intentional" injury to children.
"It gives adults who have been abused as children an opportunity to some redress through civil proceedings," said Barbara Rawn, executive director of the Richmond-based Prevent Child Abuse Virginia. "This is helping set up a safety net for people who have indeed suffered."
Yet opponents have called the amendment dangerous, hanging their opposition on an argument that repressed memories are unreliable and apt to lead to miscarriages of justice.
"The very reason for statutes of limitation is the memory of witnesses and all others concerned tend to become dim with the passage of time," said Thomas MacAdoo, a retired Virginia Tech English and foreign languages professor who lives in Blacksburg. "Any objective information is unavailable."
MacAdoo wrote a letter to the editor of the Roanoke Times & World-News, urging readers to vote against the amendment.
"There is a whole school of psychology that believes that if anybody is having psychological trouble at 30 or 40, it is because they suffered child abuse at age 8 or 10 and have forgotten all about it," MacAdoo said Friday. "These people work at great lengths to get patients to remember the abuse. After so much suggestion, almost anyone is likely to remember."
Barbara Bryan of Roanoke, communications director for the National Child Abuse Defense and Resources Center based in Toledo, Ohio, -based "David among the Goliaths of the protection racket" -called passage of the amendment a path leading to a "parental malpractice bill."
"Unless Virginia wants Roseanne rewriting our constitution, commonwealth caretakers better wake up by Nov.8," Bryan said, referring to the TV star who several years ago claimed that she had been a victim of incest, a claim disputed by her family. The amendment "puts more innocent people in jeopardy by allowing them to sue in a situation where there probably aren't going to be any witnesses."
Supporters, who argue that the effects of child abuse cannot likely be faked, do not expect the amendment's passage to open up the floodgates on cases.
Speaking at a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County on Thursday, Clute said the amendment's passage would have important symbolic value.
"It sends a message," Clute said. "We don't have to have a huge number of cases to make a significant difference."
Clute said she has talked to "hundreds" of people who want to pursue sexual abuse injury suits. Only a handful, however, have cases solid enough to take to court, indicating that the number of cases resulting from the amendment's passage likely would be few.
Clute won one of the largest jury awards for child sexual abuse - a $3 million award in Petersburg for a man who sued his father for molesting him.
"What can we do to hold the perpetrators accountable?" she asked at Thursday's forum. "Children are defenseless. We need strong public policies to hold people responsible."
Staff writer Rob Freis contributed some information for this story.
by CNB