The Polish branch of the Roman Catholic Church announced a while back that it wouldn't pay the victims of sex abuse cases. To quote spokesperson Jozef Kloch:
the Church will not pay compensation to victims of pedophile priests. The wrongdoer should do it.
That's the Roman Catholic Church in Poland's position. What about when public sector employees are involved? There's some interesting stuff going on in California:
... the state’s decision to exempt government agencies, including public schools, from a new measure intended to enable civil measures against organizations that harbor pedophiles.
In 2014, California will open a litigation “window” allowing victims of sex abuse to file lawsuits against the employers of those who abused them, on the theory that those employers are in some instances partly culpable for the abuse, which is indeed the case. The “window” is needed because, in many sex-abuse cases, the statute of limitations for civil actions runs out before victims come forward. Perversely, the law exposes only the employers; the abusers themselves remain immune to litigation.
The crosshairs here are upon the Catholic Church, which paid out some $1.2 billion to more than 1,000 victims of abuse under a similar “window” opened in 2003. A secondary target is the Boy Scouts.
So here it seems that government agencies are exempted from having to pay damages and, strangely, the pedophiles themselves are also exempted. It seems that it's only private organizations are compelled to pay. That's where things start to look a bit more like targetting of non-favoured groups. The public schools in California appear to be far from innocent:
... in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone some 600 teachers over a four-year period were fired, have resigned, or were facing sanctions because of “inappropriate conduct” relating to students. The lumping of cases together somewhat obscures things: About 60 teachers faced punishment for outright sexual relations with students (or other minors), while others were punished for offenses such as showing pornography to students, forcing students to act out “master and slave” sexual role-play scenarios, taking a student on a field trip to a sex shop, lining girls up in the classroom to judge their relative breast size before having them do jumping jacks, and old-fashioned sexual harassment. Some of these teachers had complaints in their files dating back years that had not been acted upon, while another teacher, in an episode unhappily reminiscent of Catholic priest-shuffling practices, had been in hot water at six different schools for sexual misconduct. If we limit ourselves to those cases of actual sexual relations, then a little crude extrapolation from Los Angeles’s 662,140 students to California’s 6.2 million total public-school students suggests that, in California each year, seven to eight times as much sexual misconduct takes place in public schools as in the Catholic Church.
Is there any compelling reason why a government shouldn't be compelled to pay damages relating to the actions of its employees but private organizations should? (Interestingly, there's similar court rulings in the US generally holding the police not-responsible for protecting you - perhaps one reason why you might be more justified carrying a gun out there than elsewhere).
