Justice for Sexual Assault Survivors: New Law Offers Healing

New Recourse for Survivors

In 2019, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and increasing accountability for sex crimes, New York extended the statute of limitations from 3 years to 20 years for adults filing civil lawsuits for certain sex crimes, including forcible touching, sexual abuse, and rape. However, the extension only affected new cases and could not be applied retroactively, which is where the ASA comes in.

The bill creates a one-year “look-back window” that allows individuals who were 18 years of age or older when they were harmed in New York state to file a civil lawsuit against the people, or institutions, that caused injury.

The effort is modeled after the Child Victims Act (CVA), legislation passed by the New York state Senate in 2019, that raised the criminal statute of limitations for child sexual abuse crimes by 5 years and raised the civil statute of limitations for someone seeking redress for physical, psychological, or other harm caused by child sexual abuse to age 55. The CVA look-back window was also scheduled to last for 1 year, but was twice extended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time it closed, over 10,000 cases had been filed not only against individuals but against institutions, including the Boy Scouts of America and numerous Catholic Dioceses. Attorneys anticipate a similar spike of cases with the ASA.

While a growing number of states have opened look-back windows for those who are abused as children, justice for adult survivors of sexual assault has been slow, based on the rationale that adults are better equipped to respond to acts of violence within a predictable time frame. Statutes of limitation are intended to discourage unreliable witness accounts, but they belie how insidious and devastating sexual assault can be.

It Takes Years

“It is very different than if you're a victim of a robbery where someone comes in and steals your TV or takes your jewelry,” explains Sherri Papamihalis, the clinical director at Safe Horizon Counseling Center, the only outpatient mental health clinic specializing in evidence-based trauma treatment for survivors of crime and interpersonal violence. “With assault, the body becomes the crime scene.” The emotional and physical impacts – ranging from fear, depression and anxiety, to impaired cardiovascular function and PTSD – are not linear and can be hard to detect.