Legal Interviews
3. Q: If my child comes to me and tells me he/she was sexually assaulted, what do I do next?
A:What you do next is you accept and love your child and tell your child it wasn’t their fault and get your child into some really good therapy. I know it’s not a real legal answer but that’s really what every parent should do if confronted with this. Because studies show that what happens on first disclosure has a real impact on that child’s ability to cope with what happened. So if you go to your parent and you say, “mom, so and so did this to me”, and your mom believes you and hugs you and tells you it wasn’t your fault, there’s a loving acceptance there. If your mother doesn’t believe you and says, “It was your fault, it didn’t happen,” it just makes that shame and that guilt and that secrecy even worse. So it actually creates a lot of issues. I know that’s not the legal thing but that’s, I think, incredibly important for parents or frankly for anybody to understand. From a legal perspective, there are various things you can do. The most important thing is to get information and understand what your options are. Because there are a lot of options and not every legal option is appropriate for every family… whether or not you decide to lay criminal charges; whether or not you decide to begin a civil case; whether or not you decided to go to what’s called the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board; or whether you decide to just deal with it within the family and obtained therapy for the child elsewhere. There’s a bunch of different things but knowledge is really the thing that parents should be doing. They should be informing themselves of their options and the risks to each of those options, and the possible benefits as well.
4. Q: What can people who wish to take the next step expect?
A: In most situations people come to me, whether they’re parents or whether they’re survivors themselves, the first thing that I do is I talk them through what their options are. I explain to them, you have options A, B, C and D. I tell them the good and the bad of what they can expect. And I give them knowledge. At that point, once they’ve understood what their options are, I personally tell them to go away for a while, think about what we talked about because this shouldn’t be a rash decision. Even if you think you have to do things right away, chances are you don’t have to do anything right away. It’s much better to take a step back and to really understand what’s going on. Most people really do appreciate that. Most people feel that there’s a lot of pressure that once they’ve taken the step to go talk to a lawyer they’ve got to do something and that’s not necessarily the case. You don’t have to do anything and you don’t have to do it the first time you meet a lawyer. It’s important to build a rapport with your lawyer. It’s important to understand the delays. It’s important to understand the process. It’s important to understand the costs, both financial and emotional once you begin a case. So what to expect when they go to see a lawyer such as myself is pretty much that. The first conversation is usually about options. I can’t speak for all lawyers I can only speak about myself. There are very few lawyers in the country that do a lot of this work. So finding the right lawyer is pretty important because you don’t want to go to a lawyer who doesn’t have any experience in this area. It’s not your regular case. It’s pretty specialized.
