TOPEKA, Kan. — Speaking on the Kansas Senate floor last week, Sen. Cindy Holscher told a story she had never shared publicly in her life — one that she had not even told her own parents.
The Overland Park Democrat told her colleagues that when she was a young girl a man who worked as a farmhand for her family attempted to sexually assault her, catching her alone and urging her to play Simon Says “like adults” with him.
“He was using his words and my trust as a form of manipulation to endanger me,” Holscher said. “He said your friend Julie plays this game with me.”
For four years, Holscher has led an effort in the Kansas Legislature to reform the state’s statute of limitations on child sex crimes. The bill passed by the Kansas Legislature this week would allow police to pursue criminal cases indefinitely and give survivors until they turn 31 to file a lawsuit as well as three years after a criminal conviction. It now heads to Gov. Laura Kelly’s desk.
When she began working on the issue, she didn’t yet recognize her experience as an attempted assault, categorizing it instead as a creepy situation she’d brought on herself as a child.
It was after she heard stories from survivors that she realized their abusers had used similar tactics to the farmhand.
“I haven’t felt comfortable talking about abuse that almost happened,” Holscher said in an interview. “People can understand why it’s taken me that long then hopefully they can understand why it’s taken so long for other survivors to really speak about what happened.”
After repeated setbacks the bill earned unanimous approval from the state House and Senate.
Republican Reps. Bob Lewis, Mark Schrieber and Jeff Underhill helped Holscher advocate for the bill in the House.
Speaking on the House floor Lewis, an attorney who represents survivors in cases in other states, explained the dynamics that keep survivors from coming forward until later in life.
“The bill will help at least some survivors recover their agency,” Lewis said.
Advocates had initially sought the elimination of the statute of limitations for the civil and criminal statute of limitations, but the legislation extending the time frame was passed as a compromise with Republican leaders in the Senate.
“The real goal here is to put perpetrators away from kids where they can’t cause any more harm,” Sen. Kellie Warren, a Leawood Republican, said while speaking in favor of the bill on the Senate floor.
Holscher credits the progress this year with added attention to the issue prompted by the completion of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s probe into clergy abuse and unyielding efforts by survivors within Topeka.
Over the past four years survivors have met regularly with lawmakers about the issue. This year they set up a table on the statehouse’s ground floor nearly every morning when the Legislature was in session.
The table was positioned so that nearly every office holder and staff member would need to pass it while walking from their office to the parking garage.
Lesa Patterson-Kinsey, who was abused by her father growing up, said she could tell when she began meeting with lawmakers this year that things were different. For years when she met with lawmakers they listened politely to her story but never acted. This time, she said, they were asking questions and engaging in the conversation.
“It seemed like legislators were ready,” Patterson-Kinsey said.
Patterson-Kinsey said there is a sense of validation that the policy will likely become Kansas law. But, it is far from the end.
“We hope it makes Kansas a place where predators don’t want to live,” Patterson-Kinsey said.
The bill which the House passed Monday still leaves a hard limit on civil lawsuits and will leave behind many survivors who lack the evidence for a criminal conviction but were not ready to report until late in life.
Susan Leighnor is one of those survivors. Growing up in Hutchinson Leighnor was abused by four priests. Until she was in her 60s Leighnor had no memory of the abuse. She’d repressed the memories and hadn’t reported as a child because her abusers told her she would go to hell.
Leighnor says she is disappointed by the lowered limit for civil cases in the compromise bill but plans to continue pushing the issue, and hopes for a constitutional amendment that would allow lawsuits for cases that predate the mid-'80s.
“I want justice for all of those older survivors,” Leighnor said. “We live with this every day.”
