Bill will remove time limits on sex abuse actions

The Government has accepted in principle a Labour Party Bill to remove the time-limit on victims of sexual abuse taking legal action.

Ms Jan O'Sullivan, Labour's equality and law reform spokeswoman, introduced the Bill, which seeks to remove the statute of limitations where victims have to take a case, in general, within three years of the abuse or within three years of reaching the age of 18.

"How could anyone suggest that victims of child abuse should be free to go to court if they are 20 but not if they are 22?" Ms O'Sullivan asked.

However, the Government is not willing to include physical as well as sexual abuse in the legislation. The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said he would be introducing an amendment at committee stage to confine the Bill's application to sexual abuse. He has referred the issue of legal action in physical abuse cases to the Law Reform Commission for its consideration and recommendations.

Ms O'Sullivan stressed that the Labour Bill included physical as well as sexual abuse. She strongly believed that physical abuse should be included. "I do not believe that victims of severe physical attacks, some of them graphically described on television, should have to wait again. Broken teeth, broken limbs, head injuries are serious assaults and gross abuses of power. Sexual and physical abuse have often been perpetrated at the same time." Nonetheless, Mr O'Donoghue said that while the case for changing the law of limitation as it applied to child sex abuse cases was unanswerable, the issue in other forms of abuse was not as "clearcut".

"There are questions arising from the wide range of activities which at one end of the scale would have been classed until not too long ago as reasonable corporal punishment, and at the other end of the scale are by any standard unacceptable, but may not affect the ability of a person to take legal proceedings in a given time."

The Minister said the Government needed the advice of experts on to what degree "other forms of abuse are likely to have the inhibiting effect on the victim long into adult life that is known to occur in many instances of childhood sex abuse".

He added that when the Law Reform Commission's report on this issue became available, the Government would then be able to assess what changes needed to be made in the legislation.