The pros and cons of statutory limitation on prosecution of childhood sex crimes.

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The revelation of sexual abuse perpetrated by the former BBC employee, Jimmy Savile, for a considerable number of years shocked every person in the UK. The Police stated that up to 200 victims of Savile’s crimes had come forward to report the sexual abuse. Since the revelation was made last year, many other victims of childhood sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by other sexual predators had come forward to report the victimization. The police had been investigating these cases and arrested some of the accused implicated in them.

However, public opinion is divided over these cases not only because these alleged crimes were committed several decades ago but also because the accusations may not be very reliable. While some people believe that any allegations of sexual abuse should be taken seriously regardless of when such acts were committed, others question the motives of reporting such sexual abuses committed many decades ago and are calling for statutory limitation on prosecution for sexual crimes.

Accepting the reports of sexual offences committed in the distant past can encourage victims of such victimization to come forward and report it. Victims of childhood sexual abuse do not usually report the abuse because of the fear that nobody could believe their story. Such fear of reporting is worsened by the fact that most of the alleged perpetrators were either members of the victims’ family or celebrities highly respected in society. Therefore if these victims of childhood sexual abuse should come forward now to report their victimization, the authorities should take the allegations very seriously and establish whether any prosecutions are possible. However, the extent to which such reports of sexual victimization can be believed is difficult to establish considering the findings that information recalled from our memories for events is always full of inaccuracies.

Aside from encouraging victims of childhood sexual abuse to report it, having no time limit as to when prosecution could be brought against sex offenders can serve as deterrence for potential sex predators. If perpetrators of sex crimes are brought to justice regardless of the time lapse between the commissioning of the crime and prosecution, potential sexual predators will think twice before committing sexual crimes. The extent to which deterrence can help in reducing crime rate, however, is debatable.

While there are incentives to prosecute sexual predators regardless of when the offence may have been commissioned, such prosecutions can result in unintended consequences. There is no doubt that some of the individuals coming forward to report sexual victimisation suffered the horrible ordeal. Their primary aim of reporting such abuse may not necessarily be for financial gains but to ensure that their abusers were shamed and punished. However, other individuals who may come forward to report sexual abuse may report it not because they have necessarily gone through the horrible experience and want their perpetrators shamed and punished but because they want to either benefit financially from the case or punish the accused for issues not related to such sexual crime.

This issue of unintended consequences from accepting allegations of childhood sexual abuse committed in the distant past should be taken seriously to protect innocent people from being punished unnecessarily. Research suggests that the conviction rate for people accused of childhood sexual abuse is as high as 95%. That is, only a tiny percentage of individuals accused of childhood sexual abuse came out of it unscathed. These statistics raise two questions to be answered. Is it accurate that most of the people accused of childhood sexual abuse actually committed the crime? Is the jury always very willing to convict individuals accused of such heinous crime? The answers to these questions are difficult to find.

All of these show that there are both benefits and cost of prosecuting individuals accused of committing sex crimes in the distant past. Lack of statutory limitation on prosecution for sex crimes committed in the distant past can ensure that justice is done on behalf of the victims. It might also help to deter potential childhood sexual predators. However, some concerns about this policy are associated with the accuracies of such crimes, the motives of the alleged victims, and the risk of convicting an innocent person.

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