Will the Sexual Abuse Amendment make it onto the Pennsylvania ballot in November?

A long-awaited constitutional amendment that would give victims of childhood sexual abuse the ability to sue their abusers will not be on the ballot in November unless lawmakers advance it next month.

Members of the divided Parliament remain divided. They broadly agree that voters should be given the opportunity to consider the proposal, but disagree on how the proposal should be taken forward.

Democrats, who control the state House of Representatives, want to put a single question to voters to open the lawsuit window, while Republican leaders say the anti-abuse amendment should advance along with other Republican Party priorities, including an expanded voter ID requirement.

The issue has been before the committee for almost two decades, and a few years ago it almost came to a vote, but was then thwarted by an error by the Wolf government.

Survivors report that they cannot find closure due to the lack of freedom of movement.

“Our elected officials are ignoring us and that feels awful,” Shaun Dougherty, a survivor activist from western Pennsylvania, told Spotlight PA.

The proposed amendment would give adults who were sexually abused as children a limited period of time to seek financial damages in court from those who abused them or protected the perpetrator.

A 2019 law raised the maximum age at which people abused as children can file a civil lawsuit against their abusers from 30 to 55. However, people whose abuse occurred longer ago have little recourse.

Many survivors say that when they had the opportunity to file a lawsuit, they were not yet ready to publicly confront the abuse.

The Commonwealth’s process for approving constitutional amendments is cumbersome. First, the General Assembly must pass identical language in two consecutive two-year sessions. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State is required to place advertisements about the amendment in newspapers after each bill is passed.

Once these requirements are met, the amendment will be submitted to voters for consideration.

In an email, a Pennsylvania State Department spokesperson said the agency must place ads in newspapers by Aug. 5 to meet the requirement. Writing a plain-language description of the change and placing the ads requires additional lead time.

This would require a rapid response from MPs, who are currently in the midst of budget negotiations and preparations for the November elections and would like to give the amendment to the law the necessary second round of approval.

If they fail to take action next month, lawmakers will have one last chance to pass the amendment before having to start the process over. If the proposal passes by the end of this legislative session in November, it will appear on the 2025 primary ballot.

If not, the amendment process will have to start over, meaning the question could not appear on the ballot until 2027 at the earliest.

Good governance advocates and Democrats generally oppose putting constitutional amendment proposals on the ballot in odd-numbered primaries because voter turnout is too low.

Democratic Rep. Mark Rozzi of Berks, an abuse survivor and advocate for the issue, said he would prefer not to go that route, fearing that a well-funded campaign by opponents of the measure would have more influence in a low-turnout election.

He added that there would be “more sensible voters” in the general election who would be interested in the underlying policies rather than the policies themselves.

Lawmakers could also pursue legal action through a traditional law, an idea opposed by some Republican politicians who argue such a law would be unconstitutional. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who would have to sign such a law, says he supports both options.

The state House of Representatives recently took action on this issue, amending an unrelated Senate bill this week to include a retroactive deadline. Lawmakers sent the bill back to the upper house for consideration on Wednesday, with all Democrats and more than 40 Republicans voting in favor.

The amendment was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Jim Gregory (Blair), who is himself a victim of child abuse and has been an advocate for the issue since his election to the legislature in 2018.

“We have a chance to write a new ending to this story,” Gregory said in the state House of Representatives.

Linked to other topics

In previous sessions, there had been heated debates about the change in the statute of limitations, and the state’s Catholic Conference and insurers also lobbied hard. They feared the high cost of litigation and argued that the change was unconstitutional.

Things began to change after then-Attorney General Shapiro released a grand jury report in 2018 documenting how the Catholic Church had covered up child abuse by priests. That report led to broad bipartisan support in the state House of Representatives for a civil solution.

Republican leadership in the state Senate echoed arguments from outside groups, saying that legislating a retroactive deadline would violate the state constitution and bankrupt nonprofits, but agreed to a deal that would allow the deadline to be passed as an amendment rather than law.

At the start of this legislative session, it seemed that the major conflicts surrounding the amendment had been resolved. It received broad bipartisan support on previous votes and was only kept from a vote in 2021 because of a crucial advertising error by the Pennsylvania Department of State.

But the session brought new complications stemming from largely unrelated political issues. The Republican-controlled state Senate has said it will only extend the deadline to file lawsuits if the proposal also allows referendums on expanding voter ID requirements and makes it easier for lawmakers to veto executive orders.

In 2022, the Legislature, both chambers of which were then controlled by Republicans, advanced the voter ID and regulatory changes. If the state House of Representatives agrees to advance them, they would be put to voters as separate ballot questions.

However, Democrats in the state House of Representatives refused to bundle the measures together, arguing that all three measures must be considered individually.

Both sides are dug in.

Republican state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman of Indiana told reporters in June that he would not allow a vote on the measure “unless our friends in the House see things the same way we do.” Rozzi told Spotlight PA that it was “really Joe Pittman’s decision whether or not he wants to release the hostages.”

The end of this legislative session will also bring about a fundamental change for supporters of the limitation period: The two biggest advocates of the change in the state House of Representatives, Gregory and Rozzi, will no longer be in parliament in 2025.

Gregory lost his primary to a more conservative challenger, while Rozzi decided not to run again.

Gregory and Rozzi have championed the issue in recent years, although they fell out over a short-lived deal Gregory brokered that made Rozzi speaker of the House with Republican support. Rozzi resigned shortly afterward, handing power to another Democrat.

Gregory and Rozzi have clashed publicly over the deal, but both MPs told Spotlight PA they had spoken since then, with Gregory adding that Rozzi had apologised to him earlier this year.

“He didn’t have to do it, but I always knew he would,” Gregory said.

However, there will also be voices in the legislature advocating for this issue. Two lawmakers, Reps. Maureen Madden (Democrat, Monroe) and La’Tasha Mayes (Democrat, Allegheny), shared their own stories of surviving abuse last year.

Rozzi added that Democrat Nathan Davidson, who is running for a seat in the state House of Representatives that the party is likely to win, has also expressed interest in supporting the proposal.

Davidson said he hopes the statute of limitations window is not a bill I will have to support next session, but he has already spoken with Mayes about working together on this area.

“The (last) session should have been completed,” Davidson told Spotlight PA. “But here we are, it’s still not finished. Every year we lose more survivors. And every year there are more victims.”

90.5 WESA partners with Spotlight PA, a collaborative, reader-funded newsroom that produces responsible journalism for all of Pennsylvania. More at spotlightpa.org.