ConCourt mulls abuse ruling

With the world reeling under yet more shocking revelations of sexual abuse against the rich, famous and powerful, the Constitutional Court will this week consider a watershed ruling making it possible for victims of sexual abuse to report the abuse even after 20 years had passed.

The alleged victims of the late billionaire stockbroker Sydney Frankel in June this year won a landmark case in the High Court in Johannesburg when Acting Judge Clare Hartfort ruled that the 20-year prescription regarding sexual assault offenses in Section 18 of the the Criminal Procedure Act was unconstitutional.

The judge suspended the finding for 18 months to give parliament time to remedy the defect in the CPA.

Frankel, who died in April, was facing eight civil claims of child molestation and sexual abuse. Criminal charges against him were not possible as they had prescribed due to the door being closed to victims after 20 years.

In a strongly-worded judgment, Judge Hartfort concluded that section 18 of the CPA was irrational in excluding only rape and compelled rape from the prescription period of 20 years, and not other sexual offenses.

She said to create a random cut-off time of 20 years for the prescription of sexual offenses when vast swathes of evidence demonstrated that they inflicted deep and continuous trauma on victims, was entirely irrational and arbitrary.

She said the law must encourage the prosecution of these nefarious offenses, which were a cancer in South African society, and must support victims in coming forward, no matter how late in the day.

The law should not smother a victim’s ability to bring sexual offenders to book as it presently did.

Victims should not be hushed by Section 18, she said. Men and Women Against Child Abuse director Miranda Friedmann hoped that the Constitutional Court would rubber-stamp Judge Hartfort’s findings.

“Many studies have indicated a variety of reasons for late disclosure of such abuse and we are immensely relieved that the time limit of prescription will soon no longer be a burden on victims. “There is a groundswell of acknowledgement that child sexual abuse is one of the worst human rights violations and the 20-year prescription needs to be removed,” she said.