NCJ Number
178852
Journal
Northwestern University Law Review Volume: 92 Issue: 4 Dated: Summer 1998 Pages: 1481-1500
Date Published
1998
Length
20 pages
Annotation
After drawing an analogy to the use of the legal system to prevent the exercise of new rights by an historically oppressed class in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, this essay focuses on three novel legal actions designed to deter suits by survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Abstract
The novel legal actions are malpractice suits against survivors' therapists, loss of consortium (or society) claims brought against therapists who are treating survivors, and malpractice suits against attorneys who bring civil suits for past child abuse. These three tactics have the same fundamental effect; i.e., they punish and thus deter therapists and attorneys who have helped survivors in their quest for recovery, compensation, and historic truth. In so doing, these legal approaches also punish abuse survivors for asserting their legal claims and deter them from filing civil damage suits. These novel legal actions threaten to return the long-buried reality of child sexual abuse to the silence and secrecy that has traditionally shrouded the whole subject of sexual abuse, thus restoring the balance of power in favor of the very persons who have abused that power in the past. 70 footnotes