There are moments in a parent's life that rewrite everything that came before them. The moment you learn that someone sexually assaulted your child is one of those moments. The floor drops out. The world you thought you understood rearranges itself. And when the initial shock begins to settle into something you can walk through, questions start to form: Who did this? Why wasn't my child protected? Is there anyone who should have stopped this and didn't? And what happens now?
The criminal process may already be underway, or it may be stalled, or the person responsible may never face criminal charges at all. What most families don't realize right away is that a separate civil lawsuit — a lawsuit for money damages — exists alongside the criminal system and operates independently of it. You do not need a criminal conviction to pursue civil accountability. You do not need the police to have made an arrest. The civil justice system uses a lower standard of proof, it gives you control over the process, and it can reach not just the individual who harmed your child but the institutions and adults around your child who failed to protect them.
My name is Scott DeSalvo. I have been a personal injury attorney in Chicago for over 27 years. In that time, I have represented people who were failed by systems and institutions that were supposed to protect them. When a child is sexually assaulted, the harm does not end when the abuse ends. It follows that child into adolescence and adulthood in ways that affect mental health, relationships, education, and earning ability for decades. The damages in these cases are real, significant, and legally recoverable. Call me at 312-500-4500, any hour of the day or night, any day of the week. The consultation is free, completely confidential, and carries no obligation. I handle these cases on a contingency basis — you pay nothing unless we recover compensation for your family.
National data consistently shows that approximately 93% of child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child knows. That figure should reshape how we think about where children face risk. The risk is not primarily from strangers. It is from the people who are woven into a child's daily life — the people who have been granted access, trust, and time alone with a child.
Sexual abuse perpetrated by a family member or adult in the household is the most common form of child sexual assault. It is also the form most likely to go unreported for the longest period of time, because the child is dependent on the family structure for safety and basic needs, may love the abuser, and almost certainly fears the disruption that disclosure would cause. Abuse within the family often persists for years before a child discloses, and many survivors do not fully reckon with what happened to them until they reach adulthood.
When a family member is the abuser, the civil lawsuit may focus on other adults in the household who knew or had reason to know the abuse was occurring and failed to act. Illinois law recognizes that a duty to protect a child can exist even when the person who failed to protect was not the one who committed the assault. A parent who is aware of sexual abuse by a spouse or partner and does not report it or remove the child from the situation can be held liable. Other adults in the household who had knowledge and took no action may also have civil exposure depending on the facts.
The coach-athlete relationship creates a structure of authority and trust that predatory adults exploit with methodical precision. Young athletes are taught to defer to their coaches' instructions about their bodies. They are told that discomfort is part of improvement. They undergo physical training that involves touch, correction, and close supervision. A predatory coach who understands this dynamic can exploit it to incrementally push past boundaries while maintaining the facade of legitimate training.
Illinois has seen significant civil litigation arising from sexual abuse in sports programs, spanning youth leagues, club teams, travel programs, and school-affiliated athletics. Civil lawsuits in these cases typically name not just the coach but the organization that employed or oversaw them. When a sports organization failed to conduct adequate background checks, ignored prior complaints about a coach's behavior, failed to implement policies prohibiting one-on-one private contact between coaches and minors, or created an environment in which athletes were afraid to report concerns, that organization can be held liable for the damages your child suffered.
Clergy sexual abuse of children is one of the most extensively documented forms of institutional child sexual assault in the United States, and Illinois has been no exception. The Archdiocese of Chicago, multiple downstate dioceses, and various Protestant and other religious communities have faced civil litigation over the sexual abuse of children by clergy, youth group leaders, and other faith community personnel.
What makes religious community abuse distinctive in terms of civil liability is the documented pattern of institutional concealment. Civil lawsuits in these cases have established through discovery — access to internal records — that religious institutions often had knowledge of an abuser's prior conduct, chose not to report to authorities, transferred the individual to a new assignment rather than removing them, and actively worked to prevent survivors from learning what the institution knew. When an institution has that kind of knowledge and responds by protecting itself rather than the children in its care, the legal exposure extends far beyond the individual abuser.
The trusted family friend. The neighbor who was always willing to babysit. The uncle who drove the kids to events. The adult mentor who took a special interest in a particular child. These relationships carry enormous social trust, and that social trust is exactly what predatory adults seek out and cultivate. Research published in peer-reviewed journals confirms that 99% of child sexual abuse survivors report experiencing at least one recognizable grooming behavior, with an average of over 14 grooming behaviors present in their experience. Grooming is a systematic process of victim selection, isolation, trust-building, desensitization, and post-abuse maintenance designed specifically to prevent disclosure.
In civil cases involving trusted community members, the question for liability purposes is whether any institution or organization facilitated the access that made the abuse possible. If the abuser was a volunteer for a youth organization that failed to screen them or supervise their contact with children, if a faith community or civic group gave them unsupervised access to minors without safeguards, that organization may bear civil responsibility for the harm that resulted.
Children in daycare and early childhood programs are among the most vulnerable to sexual abuse because they are young enough that their capacity to recognize, name, and report what happened to them is severely limited. A four-year-old may not have the vocabulary or conceptual framework to describe what an adult did to them. They may be confused, afraid, or have been told that what happened was normal or a secret.
Civil lawsuits arising from daycare sexual abuse focus heavily on the institution's hiring practices, supervision protocols, and physical environment. Illinois licensing requirements for childcare facilities include background checks and supervision standards, but licensed facilities do not always comply with these requirements in practice. An unlicensed facility operating without oversight creates its own category of risk. When a daycare facility employs someone who abuses a child, the facility's failure to conduct adequate screening, to maintain appropriate supervision of staff, and to establish a physical environment without isolated unsupervised spaces is the foundation of institutional civil liability.
Overnight camps, wilderness programs, sports camps, and other residential youth programs place children in environments far from their families, with adults who have total access to them around the clock. The residential setting removes the natural oversight that parents would otherwise provide. Children are sleeping in shared spaces, showering in common facilities, and engaging in activities in settings that are difficult to supervise. For a predatory adult who has sought out a position in one of these programs precisely because of the access it provides, the overnight environment offers extraordinary opportunity.
Institutional liability in camp sexual abuse cases focuses on pre-employment screening of counselors, the ratio of supervising adults to minors, the physical layout of facilities, what policies existed regarding one-on-one contact, and how the organization responded to any complaints or warning signs during the program. Camps that recruit counselors without comprehensive background investigations, that allow counselors to have unsupervised private access to campers, or that fail to train staff on mandatory reporting obligations have created the conditions for the abuse that follows.
The civil lawsuit measures damages partly through what child sexual assault costs your child across their lifetime, and those costs are profound and well-documented. Understanding them is not just important for purposes of the lawsuit — it is important because families often underestimate the long-term reach of the harm and therefore underestimate what their child's case is actually worth.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in four girls and one in thirteen boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 18. Research consistently finds that between 51% and 79% of sexually abused children exhibit significant psychological symptoms. The most common include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, and complex PTSD. Studies find that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are four times more likely to develop PTSD and substance use disorders than non-survivors. The behavioral and psychological impacts ripple into every domain of adult life: relationships, work, physical health, and the ability to trust others.
In terms of civil damages, these long-term consequences translate into calculable losses. They include the cost of years or decades of mental health treatment and therapy, lost wages and diminished earning capacity if the psychological effects impair the ability to work at full capacity, medical costs for physical health conditions linked to the trauma, and pain and suffering damages that account for the subjective experience of living with the harm that was done. In cases involving particularly egregious institutional conduct — cover-ups, deliberate concealment, protection of the abuser over the protection of children — punitive damages may also be available.
Illinois has made significant changes over the years to ensure that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are not barred from seeking justice simply because they did not recognize or report the abuse until years or decades after it occurred. The current framework under 735 ILCS 5/13-202.2 reflects the legislature's understanding of how childhood sexual trauma works — specifically, that survivors often do not connect their adult psychological and physical symptoms to the abuse they experienced as children until much later in life.
Under the current Illinois statute, an action for damages based on childhood sexual abuse can be commenced at any time for abuse occurring on or after January 1, 2014. This is effectively no statute of limitations for those claims. For abuse occurring before that date, the applicable rule is more complex and depends on when the claim arose and whether it was time-barred under prior law. The statute also contains a critical provision that most people do not know about: knowing that the abuse occurred is not, by itself, sufficient to start the limitations clock running. The clock does not start until the survivor discovers — or through reasonable diligence should have discovered — both that the abuse occurred and that an injury was caused by the abuse. Because many survivors spend years understanding the full connection between their childhood experiences and their adult mental health, this provision is legally significant.
There is also a tolling provision under 735 ILCS 5/13-202.3 that stops the limitations period from running during any time that the victim was subjected to threats, intimidation, manipulation, or fraud by the perpetrator or by someone acting in the perpetrator's interest. Abusers who used those tactics to maintain their victim's silence — and grooming almost universally involves exactly those tactics — may find that the clock was paused for the entire period of their manipulation.
Building a strong civil case for child sexual assault requires a different kind of investigation than most injury cases. We are often working with a timeline that stretches back years or decades. The abuser may have moved, died, or served criminal time. The institution that enabled the abuse may have changed ownership, destroyed records, or restructured. Here is what we typically pursue in building these cases:
The first task is mapping every adult and organization that had a role in what happened. Who gave the abuser access to your child? What did they know, and when did they know it? Were there prior complaints, prior incidents, prior red flags that were not acted upon? We look at the organization's history with this individual and with child safety issues generally. We look at what policies were supposed to be in place and whether they were actually followed. The goal is to identify every party whose failure contributed to the harm, because more defendants often means greater combined insurance coverage and a stronger negotiating position.
In civil litigation, we have the right to obtain documents and records that are not publicly available. This includes the abuser's personnel file, prior disciplinary records, internal complaint investigations, communications between organizational leadership about the abuser, and any records showing what the organization knew. These discovery tools are often where the most damaging evidence against institutional defendants is found — internal emails that show leadership learned of complaints and chose to bury them, personnel records that show prior incidents at other organizations, notes from internal investigations that were never shared with law enforcement.
Child sexual assault civil cases typically require expert testimony on the psychological and developmental harm the abuse caused, the connection between the abuse and your child's current and future damages, the standard of care that a reasonable organization in this defendant's position should have followed, and what the defendant's failures represent in terms of departure from that standard. We have relationships with experienced experts in forensic psychology, child trauma, institutional safety protocols, and economic loss calculation who have testified in cases across Illinois and who understand how to present these issues to a jury.
If the abuser was criminally charged or convicted, those records are valuable in the civil case. A criminal conviction can be used as evidence in a civil proceeding. Guilty pleas are admissions. Testimony given in criminal proceedings can be used. Even a case that resulted in a plea to a lesser charge may contain admissions or factual records that support the civil claim. We review everything from the criminal proceedings and coordinate with the state's attorney's office where appropriate to ensure the civil and criminal processes complement each other.
Damages in these cases can be substantial. Courts and juries in Illinois have demonstrated willingness to hold institutions accountable with significant verdicts and settlements when the evidence supports it. The damages we typically pursue fall into several categories:
Economic damages include the cost of past and future mental health treatment, therapy, psychiatric care, and medication. They also include lost wages or diminished earning capacity where the abuse has affected your child's ability to work at full capacity as an adult, future educational support or vocational rehabilitation costs, and any other out-of-pocket costs traceable to the abuse.
Non-economic damages are often the largest component in these cases. They include the pain and suffering your child experienced during the abuse and continues to experience, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, damage to relationships and the capacity for intimacy, and the impact on all aspects of normal development and adult functioning. These damages are not capped in Illinois for civil claims against private defendants, and in severe cases they can reach millions of dollars.
Punitive damages are available in Illinois when the defendant's conduct was intentional, fraudulent, or showed a reckless disregard for the safety of others. When an institution actively concealed abuse, intimidated survivors, transferred a known predator without disclosure, or deliberately obstructed accountability, those facts support a claim for punitive damages. The purpose of punitive damages is not just to compensate the victim — it is to punish the defendant and to deter similar conduct by others.
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Illinois law under the Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act (325 ILCS 5) requires a broad category of professionals to report known or suspected child abuse to the Illinois DCFS Hotline (1-800-25-ABUSE) immediately upon obtaining reasonable cause to believe a child has been abused or is at risk of abuse. Mandated reporters include teachers, school personnel, social workers, healthcare providers, childcare workers, law enforcement, coaches, and many others who work with children in a professional or official capacity.
When a mandated reporter fails to report, two things happen. First, the reporter themselves faces potential criminal liability — failure to report by a mandated reporter is a Class A misdemeanor in Illinois, with a first offense carrying up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Second, and more relevant to the civil case, the failure to report by an institutional employee can be powerful evidence of institutional negligence and cover-up. When a teacher, a program director, or an administrator observes warning signs or receives a disclosure from a child and chooses not to call DCFS, that decision — documented through the investigation and discovery process — can support not just a negligence claim but potentially a claim for willful and wanton conduct that avoids governmental immunity defenses for public entities.
The landscape of child sexual assault has expanded dramatically with the proliferation of smartphones and social media. Online grooming has become one of the most prevalent paths through which predatory adults gain access to children for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The pattern typically involves an adult posing as a peer or mentor, building a relationship through social media or messaging platforms over weeks or months, gradually introducing sexual content and conversation, soliciting sexual images, and ultimately attempting to arrange physical contact.
The psychological impact of online sexual exploitation is as serious as in-person abuse. Research with adult survivors of childhood online sexual abuse documents lasting harm to sense of self, trust in relationships, and mental health outcomes. Survivors often report significant self-blame because the grooming process made them feel like active participants, even though they were minors who were systematically manipulated by an adult. That self-blame is a product of the grooming, not a reflection of any fault.
Civil claims involving online exploitation may name not just the individual abuser but platforms or organizations that failed to implement reasonable safeguards to protect minor users. These cases are evolving legally, and the facts of each situation matter greatly. If your child's abuse occurred through an online platform or through digital communication facilitated by a school, program, or organization, the institutional accountability question still applies.
Yes. You do not need a complete account of every detail before consulting a lawyer. We can begin an investigation based on what you do know. Children disclose abuse in fragments over time, and the investigative process — including work with forensic interviewers and mental health professionals — may help clarify the full picture. What matters at the outset is that there is reason to believe abuse occurred. Come in and talk to me and we'll assess where things stand.
Yes, and it happens more often than people expect. In cases where the abuser is a family member, the civil lawsuit may also reach the abuser's homeowner's insurance, which in some circumstances covers claims of negligent supervision or negligent entrustment. It may also reach other adults in the household who had a duty to protect your child and failed to do so. These cases require careful handling given the family dynamics involved, but the legal options exist and can provide funding for your child's treatment and recovery.
No. A DCFS determination of unfounded — meaning DCFS did not find sufficient evidence to indicate the abuse occurred — does not bind a civil court and does not prevent a civil lawsuit. DCFS investigations and civil litigation use different standards, different investigators, and different tools. Many cases that were found unfounded by DCFS have subsequently resulted in successful civil verdicts or settlements. The civil process includes discovery tools — depositions, document requests, expert testimony — that are not available to DCFS investigators.
In most cases, yes, because the individual abuser is typically not the only viable defendant. The institutions, organizations, and other adults who enabled the abuse or failed to prevent it often have insurance coverage and assets that the abuser does not have. One of the first things we assess in every child sexual assault case is whether there are institutional defendants — employers, organizations, supervisory bodies, property owners — who can be held civilly accountable. In many cases, the institutional defendants are where the meaningful financial recovery comes from.
Possibly not, depending on when the abuse occurred and when your child discovered the connection between the abuse and their injuries. For abuse occurring on or after January 1, 2014, Illinois has eliminated the statute of limitations — there is no deadline. For earlier abuse, the analysis depends on the specific dates and the discovery rule. The limitations period in Illinois does not begin to run simply because a survivor knows abuse occurred. It runs from when they discover — or should have discovered — that an injury was caused by that abuse. I encourage anyone in this situation to call me and go through the timeline, because these cases often have more time remaining than families assume.
Civil cases for child sexual assault can range from one to three years or more, depending on the number of defendants, the complexity of the discovery process, whether there is parallel criminal litigation, and whether the case resolves through settlement or goes to trial. Cases that settle do so in a wide range — some resolve within a year if liability is clear and the institutional defendant wants to avoid the publicity of a trial. Others take longer. I keep my clients informed throughout the process and will never pressure you to accept a settlement that doesn't adequately account for your child's needs.
Protecting your child's wellbeing throughout the litigation process is a priority that I take seriously. Many cases resolve through settlement without the child ever needing to testify. When a child's testimony is necessary, Illinois courts have procedures available to limit the trauma of the process, including closed testimony with only essential participants present. A good trauma-informed therapist working with your child throughout the case is also an important part of managing this. We talk through these issues at the beginning of the representation so families understand what to expect and can plan accordingly.
A civil lawsuit is entirely independent of whether the perpetrator was charged or convicted. You do not need a police report, a criminal charge, or a conviction to pursue civil claims. The civil standard of proof — more likely than not — is fundamentally different from the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of the most successful civil cases for child sexual assault involve perpetrators who were never criminally prosecuted, either because the statute of limitations on the criminal side had run, because evidence sufficient for a criminal conviction wasn't available, or because prosecutors exercised discretion not to charge. None of those factors prevents a civil lawsuit.
Child sexual assault cases require a lawyer who understands the depth of the harm, knows how to investigate institutional failures, and is willing to take on the powerful organizations that enabled what happened to your child. I have spent 27 years representing people whose injuries were made worse by institutions that protected themselves instead of the people in their care. I trained at Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyer's College and The Edge program. I have tried more than 30 cases to jury verdict. I understand what it takes to hold institutions accountable when they have every resource and motivation to avoid it.
I also understand what it takes to get these cases right from the beginning. The first call you make sets the direction of everything that follows. Evidence can be lost if it isn't preserved quickly. Witnesses' recollections change over time. Institutional defendants begin building their defenses from the moment they learn a claim may be coming. The sooner we start, the stronger our position.
Call me at 312-500-4500, any time of day or night. The consultation is free, private, and carries no obligation. We serve clients throughout the Chicago area and across Illinois, and we offer Spanish-language services. If we take your case, you pay nothing out of pocket. My fee is a percentage of what we recover for you and your family — and if we don't recover, you owe nothing. Let's talk about what happened and what your options are.
Scott DeSalvo founded DeSalvo Law to help injured people throughout Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Licensed to practice law in Illinois since 1998, IARDC #6244452, Scott has represented over 3,000 clients in personal injury, workers compensation, and accident cases.
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