AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Massachusetts residents say they believe that the state should eliminate the statute of limitations for reporting child sexual abuse, but Beacon Hill leadership doesn’t seem eager to talk about a bill under negotiation that could do just that.
Legislative leaders this week have kept their comments general about a provision tacked onto the House’s version of a primary care reform bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations on civil child sexual abuse cases, remove the $20,000 charitable immunity cap, and create a two-year window for survivors to revive expired abuse claims.
The amendment, adopted with little fanfare in the closing days for formal business this summer, was introduced by Rep. John Lawn, of Watertown, who serves as House chair of the Legislature’s Health Care Financing Committee.
Lawn, himself a survivor of child sexual abuse, was then left off the six-person conference committee negotiating an agreement between the House and Senate versions of the health care bill, despite serving both as the chief author of the amendment and as his chamber’s point person on the underlying primary care reforms.
Now, lawmakers are weighing the bill as the state grapples with the latest revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Attorney General Andrea Campbell took to the podium on September 30 and announced her office’s investigation into child sexual abuse in three Massachusetts Catholic dioceses.
More than 270 Catholic clerics in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester abused nearly 1,000 children for more than half a century, with church leaders shielding predators and concealing allegations, the scathing and long-awaited report found.
But Campbell said she faced “significant barriers” in bringing charges against any clergy members, since the current Massachusetts statute of limitations allows claims to be within 35 years of a victim turning 18, or when they reach 53 years of age. Advocates note research shows the typical survivor does not first disclose abuse until their 50s.
Campbell called on lawmakers to update the law, highlighting the efforts by Lawn and Sen. Joan Lovely to craft such legislation. (Lovely has put forward several bills that would eliminate the statute of limitations for these cases.) In response, top Democrats have only spoken vaguely about the proposal and the conference committee discussions.
A spokesperson for Speaker Ron Mariano’s office noted Wednesday that the amendment is currently in private negotiations and referred to the Speaker’s remarks in late September regarding Lawn’s absence from the committee. With the seriousness of the health care cost crisis, he said, House budget chair Aaron Michlewitz was tapped to lead negotiations.
“The message I wanted to send was ‘This is extremely important to us. We’ve got our best guy on it,’” Mariano told reporters.
Lawn did not respond to request for comment Wednesday on the bill or conference committee. In September, Lawn declined to comment about his exclusion when asked by reporters.
Senate President Karen Spilka did not comment on the amendment specifically, though her office pointed out the Senate approved a similar reform two years ago.
“The Senate President supports survivors of child sexual assault,” a spokesperson for Spilka’s office said in a statement. “The Senate is on record supporting the elimination of the statute of limitations in civil cases last session. The conferees are currently engaging on this issue to help ensure victims are heard and perpetrators are held to account.”
Discussion of sexual abuse claims in Massachusetts is often tightly tied to the revelations of widespread abuse by clergy explored in The Boston Globe’s famed Spotlight series that began in 2002. Decades of efforts to widen the window in which survivors can come forward have frequently met forceful public objection from the Catholic Church, warning that a slew of claims from decades past could bring the institution to its knees financially and inhibit its own ability to support survivors.
Three years ago, the Archdiocese of Boston opposed similar legislation proposed by Lovely, who is a survivor of child sexual abuse.
“The legislative changes currently proposed and under consideration would jeopardize our ability to continue to [support survivors] and would make it difficult to sustain the many works of mercy the Church is committed to through social justice and support for the neediest,” the Archdiocese said in a 2023 statement.
The Archdiocese of Boston did not respond to a CommonWealth Beacon inquiry made this week asking if it opposed the current amendment.
The Catholic League, the nation’s largest Catholic advocacy organization, released a letter to Gov. Maura Healey, Campbell, and bishops on October 2. The group said the letter was because of Campbell’s investigation into the dioceses and called for an investigation into the abuse of students in the public schools.
“To be fair,” the League wrote, “the investigation must extend back to the days of Prohibition. After all, the probe of the Catholic dioceses extended over a century.”
The group called for sovereign immunity — which shields some state employees from lawsuits if they were engaged in the normal course of their jobs — to be abolished to clear the way for suits against public school employees.
Efforts to raise the $20,000 liability cap for charitable organizations must apply to the public sector as well, the League wrote, “otherwise it might be read as religious profiling and therefore subject to a lawsuit.”
No church or other organization is specifically singled out in the legislative amendment. Campbell described her office’s investigation as part of a long effort to find answers about the scope of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of Massachusetts.
“This investigation was not about demonizing a faith or a church,” said Campbell at the press conference, during which she also disclosed that she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. “Rather, it was about seeking justice, a value and a promise our faith and the God I serve so deeply reflects.”
Her abuse, she said, was “not at the hands of the church, but at the hands of a relative.”
Boston-based group Enough Abuse, the nation’s oldest citizen-based child advocacy organization, released a poll a week after the investigation announcement. The poll of 802 registered voters in Massachusetts was conducted by The MassINC Polling Group, which is owned by CommonWealth Beacon publisher MassINC.
Almost 60 percent of respondents said they think sexual abuse of children is either very common or somewhat common in the state.
The poll did not single out clergy. It asked respondents if “organizations such as schools, religious organizations, or youth programs that knowingly enabled sexual abuse to occur and failed to protect children from sexual abuse should be held accountable.” Only 3 percent of respondents disagreed, with 93 percent either strongly or somewhat agreeing.
The group put the poll in the field weeks before the attorney general’s report was released, with the aim of gauging support for legislation to change state law on child sexual abuse.
Jetta Bernier, executive director of Enough Abuse, detailed a winding path to the amendment’s inclusion.
Lovely, Lawn, and Rep. Ken Gordon have consistently filed bills to eliminate the statute of limitations and the charitable cap, as well as create a window for expired claims to be brought forward. This session, Bernier noted, those bills were reported out favorably from the Joint Committee on the Judiciary.
“We were very pleased that the bills were moving that fast,” she said during a presentation of the poll results. “But as the session began to come to a close at the end of June, I think it appeared that perhaps the bill might be in jeopardy. And so Rep. Lawn introduced an amendment.”
Pollsters asked about the proposed law to eliminate the time limit for filing civil lawsuits related to child sexual abuse. Respondents overwhelmingly said they would strongly (60 percent) or somewhat (24 percent) support this change, and 79 percent said they would like their state legislators to vote for it.
At the poll release event, Lovely said the conference committee is “working very hard” on the health care bill, though the subject matter can still make people nervous.
“I’ve been working for the last almost 14 years in the Senate to talk about this,” she said. “It’s the most uncomfortable subject that you can talk about. People don’t want to talk about it. They shut down and they say, ‘It doesn’t happen in my world,’ when it could have, or has.”
Chris Lisinski contributed to this report.
