Opinion: Will California lawmakers break their promise to child sexual abuse survivors?
Related: Tax dollars should fund children’s education, not attorneys’ fees in child sex abuse cases
Lobbyists for school districts, public employee unions and insurance interests are again pressuring California legislators to emasculate Assembly Bill 218, a measure legislators enacted unanimously in 2019 to close a gaping loophole in the statute of limitations that let schools avoid civil liability for enabling or covering up child sexual abuse by teachers and staff.
AB 218 passed as awareness grew of the psychological, cultural and economic barriers victims face, discouraging them from disclosing their abuse — often for many years — as well as the revelation of mass abuse cases still occurring. Case in point: the horrific Miramonte Elementary School case in which Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Mark Berndt posed and photographed dozens of third graders eating cookies laden with his semen, a jar of which he kept on his desk. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Last year intense lobbying by anti-AB 218 forces resulted in two bills, which failed to advance to floor votes after an enormous backlash from survivors and victims’ advocates.
Senate Bill 577, authored by Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, proposed some reasonable modifications of existing law, but the bill was hijacked. School districts, counties and Joint Powers Authority lobbyists insisted on amendments to drastically reduce survivors’ access to compensation.
SB 832, authored by teachers’ union standard bearer Sen. Ben Allen, would have gutted survivors’ rights.
These same powerful forces are again poised to introduce draconian AB 218-related “reforms” in the 2026 session that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for survivors to obtain full compensation.
What’s most troubling is the intentionally opaque way AB 218-related bills are being discussed. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas has reportedly assigned a group of lawmakers to “explore solutions that strike the right balance” of liability for child sexual abuse. This is happening behind closed doors.
It comes as no surprise that proponents of anti-survivor measures would want to maintain anonymity. During the 2025 session, lawmakers complained when victims’ advocates labeled them “child sexual abuse enablers.”
It is a fitting moniker for politicians who ignore the enormity of the child sexual abuse crisis, which is estimated to affect more than 10% of K-12 public school students.
The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom knew that compensating victims wouldn’t be cheap, but they rightly concluded it was a necessary and moral step to take responsibility for the devastation of thousands of lives and to deter future abuse in schools.
Five years later, school and insurance lobbyists are misrepresenting the fiscal impact of AB 218 while blaming child sexual abuse survivors.
The vast majority of school districts are fiscally sound. The state’s school finance watchdog, California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, recently found most district financial positions “remained strong.” Only four districts face significant fiscal distress — a decline from prior years.
The biggest driver of emerging gaps in school finance is not sexual abuse claims but a steady decline in K-12 enrollment, on which state school funding is based.
School districts and their insurance allies claim to support justice for abuse survivors, but their well-paid lobbyists are doing everything possible to roll back victims’ rights. They refuse to accept responsibility for decades of malfeasance, during which thousands of children were abused in their care, and they seek to limit the rights of future victims.
At the same time teachers’ unions fight against common sense reforms, such as a statewide registry of school predators and increased criminal penalties for failure of “mandatory reporters” to inform law enforcement of suspected abuse.
In 2019, the Legislature and Governor Newsom made a promise to survivors that they would have the same rights to compensation as victims whose abuse occurred in private settings, such as in churches or the Boy Scouts.
Breaking that promise now would not only work a grave injustice to past and current survivors, it would also substantially reduce public schools’ motivation to take more serious steps to protect children from predators.
John Manly is an attorney representing children who were victims of sexual abuse and assault.