HARD COPY: Who – exactly – foots the bill for justice?
As more cases of sexual abuse get unearthed, society grapples with finding justice for victims. Justice often looks like hefty sums of money paid out by organizations via settlements. Los Angeles County, for instance, recently reached a tentative agreement to pay $4 billion to settle more than 6,800 claims of sexual abuse of children in foster care and juvenile detention facilities dating back to the 1950s, a sum that threatens to bankrupt the county. AEI fellow Naomi Schaefer Riley raises some important considerations about this form of reconciliation. Riley observes, “it is worth understanding what it will cost people in need currently to compensate those who have been harmed in the past.” Organizations from the Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church are faced with the same challenge. Such payments, which come to over $500,000 per claimant, have created a crisis of insurance companies being unwilling to write liability policies for foster care agencies, such that most are unable to continue operation in California and many other states. Thus, the children who needs help right now, lose out. As much as we sympathize with victims of abuse, it’s worth wondering whether paying out bucket loads of money many years after the fact really helps? Since wealthy personal injury attorneys are the greatest beneficiaries of these settlements, do they encourage false claims based on dubious “recovered memories” or even outright fraud?
I have no doubt that some real abuse happened here, but the problem with resurrecting these very old cases is that the alleged perpetrators are usually dead and unable to defend themselves, so the court has nothing to rely upon but the testimony of the claimant. There are good reasons why we used to have a statute of limitations for such harms. There should be a cap on damages, as in EEO sexual harassment claims (where the maximum is $250K), and a limit on the fees attorneys can collect. Otherwise there is just too much incentive for manufacturing decades-old claims that are impossible to refute.