Reviving the proposed constitutional amendment to give childhood sexual abuse survivors a shot at justice would be a mistake, a lawyer who represented victims of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky told lawmakers Thursday.
Instead, the General Assembly should work to pass a simple bill to create a two-year window for childhood sex abuse victims to seek justice, even after their time to sue has passed, University of Pennsylvania law professor Marci Hamilton said.
“A statute can be enacted in the next month, it can be voted on. It can become the law,” she testified in a House Democratic Policy Committee hearing on new bills that aim to give survivors their day in court.
State lawmakers have been working for two decades to pass legislation or a constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend the statute of limitations for adults to seek accountability for abuse they suffered as children.
A statute of limitations is a limit on the timeframe in which a person may file a civil lawsuit. Until just seven years ago, abuse survivors had only two years after turning 18 to sue. In 2019, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a law that now gives survivors until they hit 30.
But for those who were already past that age, there is no opportunity to hold responsible their abusers or the people and institutions who enabled them, presenters testified.
The Democratic-led House passed two bills last summer that would create a two-year window for older abuse survivors to file lawsuits. Both have been awaiting consideration in the Republican-controlled Senate since last June.
House Bill 462 would amend existing state law to create a two-year window. H.B. 464 would do so by amending the state Constitution, a process that requires identical bills to pass both chambers of the General Assembly in consecutive legislative sessions before going to voters in a referendum. Rep. Nate Davidson (D-Dauphin) is prime sponsor of both measures.
Pennsylvania nearly completed the amendment process in 2021, but an error in publishing the proposed amendment to meet public notice requirements set the effort back to square one.
“In some ways, they did us a favor,” Hamilton said, of the mistake by Wolf’s secretary of state Kathryn Boockvar, who resigned after accepting responsibility for the oversight.
Hamilton said a referendum would spur an opposition campaign by deep-pocketed institutions and insurance companies that nonprofit advocacy groups could never match. She estimated opponents to the amendment could spend as much as $9 million to defeat it.
Lara St. John became an accomplished classical violinist despite being abused and raped by her teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia while she was a teenage student, she said in the hearing.
“I am one of a legion of child victims of sexual abuse who want things to change. None of us will have closure for what happened to us until we can pursue justice in court,” St. John said, adding that she put her career on the line to tell her story in a Philadelphia Inquirer report in 2019.
Until schools and institutions know they will be held legally accountable, many will ignore victims of sex crimes because it’s their easiest course of action, she said.
“We need to protect children by holding the abusers and their enablers and the institutions and schools responsible for their crimes, even if many years have passed,” St. John testified.
Developmental psychologist Jennifer Noll told lawmakers that sexual abuse in the United States is alarmingly common.
“Every time we ask, we find out that it’s more common,” Noll said, adding that a 2025 analysis found one in four girls and one in six boys have been sexually abused. “So whatever we’re doing, it ain’t working.”
Academics have known for decades that childhood abuse is linked to myriad mental health consequences, but more recently research has found associations with physical health and biological processes such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and early death.
“It needs to be recognized that the damage from sexual abuse is observed even down to the cellular and molecular levels,” Knoll said “Further, sexual abuse creates barriers to economic mobility and reduces economic prosperity. It’s linked to occupational difficulties, unemployment, financial instability and increasing reliance on government assistance.”
Gabriella Romero, public policy director at the Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect (PCAR), noted that in grand jury reports on clergy sexual abuse in Philadelphia starting in 2005 and in dioceses across the state in 2018, each recommended a retroactive window for survivors to sue.
“Survivors deserve every tool in their toolbox to help them heal, whatever that looks like for them,” Romero said, noting survivors’ journeys and how they process trauma don’t conform to a timeline.
Many, she said, never disclose that they were abused while others may do so in their 30s or 40s.
“But even if they choose not to, knowing that a statute of limitations reproductive window is an option for them, can still be extremely powerful,” Romero added.
