Category Archive for : ‘STATE BY STATE PENNSYLVANI’

By Jan Murphy

Gov. Tom Wolf is threatening to turn up the heat on state lawmakers this summer to pass a bill that gives victims of child sexual abuse the opportunity to sue their abusers in court

Wolf announced Monday he will call them back to Harrisburg for a special session if they fail to send him a bill that opens a two-year retroactive window for these victims to file lawsuits outside of the statute of limitations as part of the state budget package in June.

“This needs to be the top priority,”

April 21, 2021
Angela Couloumbis
Inquirer

HARRISBURG — A key state Senate committee on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved legislation to temporarily allow survivors of decades-old child sexual abuse to sue the perpetrators, an alternative path to justice after a Wolf administration error derailed a previous effort.

The 11-3 vote by the Judiciary Committee positions the bill for a historic floor debate as early as next week, a win for survivors and their advocates who have been pushing for it since the child sexual-abuse cover-up scandal that enveloped the Catholic Church in the early 2000s.

In bringing

March 22, 2021
Angela Couloumbis
Inquirer

HARRISBURG — Survivors of child sexual abuse will have to wait until at least 2023 for the public to consider whether to grant them a special window to sue their perpetrators over conduct that happened many years ago and was, in many cases, systematically covered up.
Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) said in a statement Monday that her caucus does not believe the matter rises to the level of an emergency, effectively ending frenzied efforts in recent weeks to place the question before voters this May.

Lawmakers

January 13, 2021
Kate Sweigart
ABC 27

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — More than a dozen pieces of legislation in Pennsylvania aimed at helping sexual assault victims are now law.
According to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, all of their legislative priorities for the 2019-2020 legislative session passed–something they say is unprecedented.
The 13 new laws include statute of limitations reform in sexual abuse cases, requiring colleges to establish online, anonymous reporting options for victims, and criminalizing sexual extortion.
“These are acts of exploitation and coercion that have happened for a very long time, but yet were

November 26, 2019
Paolo Zialcita
NPR

Pennsylvania overhauled its child sexual abuse laws Tuesday, as Governor Tom Wolf signed three bills meant to protect sexual assault survivors. The reforms incorporate recommendations made by a grand jury after hundreds of cases of clergy abuse were uncovered in 2018.
Decades of alleged misconduct and cover-ups were outlined in the grand jury’s report, implicating more than 300 priests in a statewide sex scandal. Nearly every instance of abuse was too old to be prosecuted, a fault legislators said the new bills will repair.

“These reforms fundamentally change our

November 18, 2019
Ellie Silverman
Inquirer

Lara St. John, the famed violinist who alleged that she was sexually abused by her teacher at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in the 1980s, on Monday joined calls for statute of limitation reform in Pennsylvania, the same day the legislature moved on a compromise still criticized as not going far enough.

“The most important thing for me, obviously, is just justice for people who were children at the time,” St. John said at a news conference Monday, standing alongside CHILD USAdvocacy executive director Kathryn Robb and