HONESDALE, PA — National data on sexual abuse has shown that when a survivor of childhood sexual assault chooses to come forward about their experience, it’s often not until many years have passed. As executive director of the Victims Intervention Program in Wayne and Pike counties, Michele Minor Wolf said she’s known this to be true. In addition to societal stigmas and feelings of personal shame or guilt that can prolong someone’s silence, Minor Wolf said that many abusers threaten their victims with violence if they talk.

“Even within our own local agency here, people might be in their 50s or older before they’ve ever told anybody,” she said. “It is such a normal part of that trauma to not come forward [until later in life]. We’re not talking about 10 percent of victims… we’re talking about the vast majority of victims.”

Until several years ago, Pennsylvanians who were sexually abused as children had until the age of 30 to file claims regarding childhood assaults. In 2019, PA increased the cutoff to 55, but survivors who were already older than 30 at the time of its passing are still considered to be outside the statute of limitations. Advocates say that even with recent reforms, justice for many survivors remains off the table.

“There’s nothing worse than to then say to [survivors], ‘Sorry, you’re a year too late,” Minor Wolf said.

Now, the General Assembly in Harrisburg is considering legislation—Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 1—that would both create a two-year window for childhood sexual abuse survivors to revive outdated claims and bring charges against their alleged abusers. Unlike typical legislation, this measure would be carried out through a constitutional amendment, a more convoluted process that requires the bill to survive multiple rounds of voting in both chambers, as well as a referendum during either a primary or general election.

Survivors and advocates have spent decades lobbying for this measure. In fact, identical legislation already passed the General Assembly once before. The question was expected to appear on voters’ ballots in the 2020 election, but the PA Department of State bungled the procedure, and failed to advertise the ballot question before its deadline. Former Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar resigned over the mishap, and legislators found themselves back at square one. 

“After the Department of State dropped the ball and didn’t do their part, that’s when things got really frustrating,” said Minor Wolf, who had testified in favor of the two-year window before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2019. “Victims and survivors were expected to just start all over again, and we had been working on this for two decades already.”

This time around, as members of the state House listen to testimony about the proposed bills, it’s political jockeying, not bureaucratic missteps, that could thwart survivors’ chances for justice.

The idea of a two-year window itself enjoys wide bipartisan support. Earlier this year, however, the Republican-led state Senate lumped the potential amendment into a package with more partisan measures: one that would have given the legislature the authority to strike down regulations without the governor’s approval and another that would create more stringent voter identification requirements.

The House Judiciary Committee, with a Democratic majority, has since removed the two more controversial measures from S.B.1. House Republicans have predicted that Republican Senators will vote ‘no’ on the bill if it doesn’t include those two measures and that the revised bill is as good as dead by the time it gets back to the Senate.

As the conversation around the amendment becomes more politically charged, advocates are trying to steer the issue back to the survivors themselves. 

During a recent press conference, an anonymous 57-year-old man shared his experience as a nine-year old, when he was repeatedly abused by his teacher and family friend. At 14, he told his parents, but “they didn’t really know how to deal with it,” so he turned to drugs and alcohol. He didn’t come forward about what happened until adulthood. The press conference was hosted by Marsh Law Firm, a Pittsburgh-based practice that exclusively handles sex abuse cases.

“I had no way of dealing with what had happened to me… I was lost,” he said. “I wasn’t given the ability, or the sense, or the time to address this. That’s why, to me as an adult, this [two-year window] is the only chance I have.”

Cases like his, in which the abuser is both an authority figure as well as someone children are taught to trust, are why Minor Wolf said educating children from an early age is vital to preventing prolonged suffering.

“If we could get in [the schools] and talk to children while they’re younger and start working on this kind of stuff, then maybe there wouldn’t be so much shame… they wouldn’t have to suffer in silence for so long,” she said.

VIP works with many schools throughout both counties, providing counselors and educational presentations. The latter, however, can sometimes be an uphill battle.

During April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, VIP teaches college-bound high schoolers about the importance of consent. One local school, however, which Minor Wolf declined to name, wouldn’t allow the presentation because it included the word “consent,” preferring instead to “preach abstinence” to its students.

“The schools want to preach abstinence—I get that—but that’s not really what reality is,” Minor Wolf said. “The fact that we couldn’t get one of our Sexual Assault Awareness Month presentations into a school because we had the word ‘consent’ in it was horrifying, and it made me think this is how much more work we still have to do.”

With the future of the proposed amendment bills still uncertain, House Judiciary Chairman Tim Briggs, a Democrat from Montgomery County, said he’s planning to also send the GOP-majority Senate another bill that would enact the two-year window via simple statute, not a constitutional amendment.

“The goal is to send them multiple options,” Briggs said. “I am optimistic that we can get this done.”