Legal

One of CHILD USA’s primary missions is to end the child sex abuse statutes of limitation (“SOLs”) that have held back victims from justice and healing. They have also blocked the public from learning what it needs to know to prevent abuse to children. We have a tremendous amount of information about the laws themselves, current developments, and the SOL reform movement on our website at www.childusa.org/law.

This category in our library is intended to provide another angle on the legal issues that are involved in the child sex abuse universe. We have included books by lawyers in the trenches, online resources aimed at educating lawmakers and policymakers about various legal issues, and other law-centered resources. There are also some resources for lawyers in the field from leading experts like Prof. Kathleen Faller.

To be sure, everything on CHILD USA’s portal interfaces with law and public policy in some way and so you will also find discussions relevant to the legal side of child sex abuse in our other categories, from Survivors to Parents and the contexts of Religious, Sports and the Arts, and Schools.

Indeed, one of my favorite law professors at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Seth Kreimer, would frequently say in class, “The law is a seamless web.” In a constitutional democracy with emerging rights for children and survivors, that is a fact about this portal! But the law is also intertwined with the battle for these rights in many different spaces. So I urge the lawyers visiting our portal to look beyond this category to all of the other categories as well.

I hope you will find this section inspiring and enlightening.

— Prof. Marci Hamilton, Founder/CEO of CHILD USA

Books

Our selected books are typically available in public and/or university libraries.