For the past few years, my advocacy nonprofit Into Account has been a partner organization with the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project based at the University of California-Riverside. On May 30-31, they’re hosting a hybrid conference called Surviving the Law: Legal Advocacy for Survivors and Scholars.
If you’re reading this newsletter because you’re a survivor and/or a fellow advocate, I hope you can join me in Riverside, or attend online. The registration is sliding scale. I’m excited to be part of the lineup of speakers, which includes a number of my friends and advocacy colleagues, and some of my advocacy role models (including Terry McKiernan, the founder and president of the massive online archive Bishop Accountability).
Some of the panel titles include: “Survivor Experiences in Litigation: First-Person Accounts,” “Barriers to Justice: Agency, Education, Disability, Isolation, and Trauma,” “Post-Publishing Hazards for Scholars and Survivors: Libel, Subpoenas, Publishers’ Liability, and Personal Risks in Writing about Abuse,” and “Reform v. Abolition: Confronting Mixed Feelings.”
I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled “Institutional Firewalls: Bankruptcy, Insurance, Legal Teams, Enablers, and NDAs.” The title of my talk is “In the Shadow of ‘Zero Tolerance’: When Liability Avoidance Leaves Survivors Behind.”
Shortly after I turned in that title to the conference organizers yesterday morning, I read a New York Times article about a $4 billion settlement agreement that Los Angeles County has made to pay the plaintiffs in nearly 7,000 sexual abuse claims involving foster care and juvenile detention facilities. The size and scope of the settlement is at least partly due to the fact that the Child Victims Act in California opened up a “lookback window,” which temporarily lifted the civil statute of limitations (SOL) for child sexual abuse in the state.
One of the lawyers who represented many of the plaintiffs is quoted saying, “This settlement is proof that the law works.” I don’t know if he was talking about the Child Victims Act, the “lookback window,” or just “the law” in general, but yikes, is that quote ever a gut punch.
My hope is that it was taken out of context, because otherwise, it’s cruel. When successful victim attorneys speak about the law as though it’s an unambiguously effective deterrent against abuse, as though lawsuits are the key to systemic change, as though the law is the most authoritative arbiter of the truth, and as though survivors will find a level playing field in the courts, it feeds a discourse that erases most survivors and most of survivor experience.
Just because a three-year lift on SOLs allows some survivors a successful lawsuit does not mean that the law “works” for survivors. These child sexual abuse SOL lookback windows open the door for more successful litigation on behalf of survivors than would otherwise be possible within an undeniably bleak legal landscape, but I suspect that a litigator who sees that as the law “working” is measuring success by the size of their contingency fees.
The victims who are paying those fees out of their settlement money, who went through the years-long living hell that civil suits inflict on sexual abuse victims—they can say they survived. Let’s not pretend that constitutes some systemic legal triumph. Some of the coverage I’ve seen of the LA County story is already pitting survivor plaintiffs against LA County taxpayers, but survivor plaintiffs themselves pay huge taxes on settlement payouts.
Surviving the law isn’t the same thing as benefiting from it. If the law really worked for survivors, with no qualifying quotations marks required, we’d be having different conferences, and different conversations.
We can, and should, resist the position that our society seems to have given the law as the authoritative word on the truth about sexual abuse. Not because the law isn’t an important arena in which to confront the problem, but because privileging it to this extent obscures so much historical and experiential complexity.