CLAIMS for compensation against public authorities in child abuse cases are complicated and it is important that claimants instruct solicitors who specialise in this area.

These claims are expensive to run, legal aid can be difficult to obtain and claimants will generally have to find a solicitor who is prepared to take on the risks of running such a claim with no guarantee of success.

One of the earliest difficulties encountered by solicitors in running these claims is the issue of what is called “limitation”.

In England and Wales, most personal injury claims have a limitation period of three years from the date of when the cause of action took place. In other words, if you are knocked down by a car you have three years to make a claim through the courts. That three-year period does not start to run until the claimant turns 18.

For most practical purposes, in child abuse claims involving claims for negligence against a public authority that three-year period does not expire until the child’s 21st birthday. In claims of assault for example against the Catholic Church the period is six years and therefore the 24th birthday.

In most child abuse claims, however, the legal action is brought many years, and in some cases decades, after the alleged abuse occurred and many years after the limitation date has expired.

There are good reasons why claims must be brought within a limited time frame. People and organisations are entitled to certainty about the prospect of litigation. It is not fair or in the interest of justice for potential claims to hang around forever. On a more practical note, an organisation may legitimately state that where a claim is brought many years after the event there is a much greater risk that relevant evidence will have been lost or destroyed, witnesses will be untraceable or their memories unreliable or that the allegations themselves will be stale or unreliable.

There are, however, good reasons why many of these claims relate to events many years or often decades ago. One of the features of abuse is that it is accompanied by secrecy, pressure to remain silent and until relatively recently children who have reported abuse were frequently not believed and once having reported it to a social worker, for example, did not do so again. It is now well documented that many victims only disclose childhood abuse when they become aware from press coverage that others had been abused by the same perpetrator and conclude they are now likely to be believed. There is the embarrassment and shame and it is only recently that the social climate has become more receptive to allegations of abuse.

In the Oxford cases connected to the Bullfinch and Sabaton trials, for example, the victims who were abused were told that they were naughty and out of control girls. The men who were perpetrating the abuse were not arrested by the police and were more or less told to go on their way while the girls were treated as having brought it upon themselves by the way they dressed and their behaviour. There was no recognition that they were, in fact, children in need of protection and care.