Recently, in many English-speaking countries, legal principles that had the effect of barring delayed criminal prosecutions have been abrogated. In these jurisdictions, criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse that is alleged to have occurred in the distant past (historic child sexual abuse or HCSA) are a growing legal challenge. These cases raise myriad issues relevant to research and the development of public policy that would benefit from a considered exchange of ideas that is informed by a clear understanding of the phenomenon. Based on 2064 judicial decisions of Canadian criminal complaints of HCSA we describe the trial, the complainant, the accused, and the offence. In the context of these legal cases, we raise some of the germane issues as well as suggestions for future research and discussion that we believe are particularly current and pressing.
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Notes
Not all adults who delayed legal recourse also delayed disclosure. In our data set, 19.8% of the complainants were reported to have made an informal disclosure (for instance to a non-offending parent) prior to making a formal complaint (e.g., to the police). It is, of course, true that some complainants will have made an earlier informal disclosure but the judge did not include this fact in his or her reasons.
Plea was not available in 241 pre-trial hearings, 9 sentencing hearings, and 14 Court of Appeal hearings.
The number of outcomes does not sum to the number of appeals because in three cases the decision related to an application to appeal and in another case it was an application for release pending the appeal.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author and from the Alberta Law Foundation and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the second author. We thank Pamela VanNorden-Schaefer for invaluable assistance with data analyses. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Portions of the results have been previously presented at meetings of the American Psychology-Law Society in March 2002 and the Canadian Psychological Association in June 2001.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Variables and Percent Intercoder Agreement in Waves 1 and 2
Appendix B: Definition of Categorical Variables
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Connolly, D.A., Don Read, J. Delayed Prosecutions of Historic Child Sexual Abuse: Analyses of 2064 Canadian Criminal Complaints. Law Hum Behav 30, 409–434 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9011-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9011-6