With limitation periods gone, Survivors are coming forward decades after the harm was done. Meeting a person who has carried it for that long asks something specific of an assessment.
Some of the most significant files a plaintiff lawyer will handle arrive long after the harm was done. A Survivor walks in at 55 to describe abuse that happened when they were nine. The abuser responsible may be elderly, or dead. The institution may have changed its name twice. There is no fresh bruise, no recent police report, sometimes no contemporaneous record at all - only a person, and trauma they have carried for most of their life.
For years, Canadian law treated that delay as a barrier. It no longer does.
In 2016, Ontario removed the limitation period for civil claims based on sexual assault entirely, and most provinces have since adopted similar exemptions. A Survivor can now bring a claim decades after the events without the clock being used against them. Courts have also adjusted how they approach these cases in other ways - recognizing, for instance, that a Survivor whose development was derailed by abuse may never have had the chance to establish the career or earning path the harm interrupted.
This is a meaningful shift. But removing the limitation period does not remove the evidentiary challenge. It moves it. The question is no longer whether a Survivor is allowed to come forward - it is how you establish, to a court's satisfaction, that harm inflicted decades ago is connected to the injury in front of them today.
The first thing worth understanding is that late disclosure is not unusual. It is what the research predicts.
Studies consistently find that Survivors of childhood sexual abuse wait, on average, around 20 years before disclosing - and more than 70% do not disclose within five years of the abuse. For men, the delay is longer still: one study found male Survivors took nearly 30 years before they could talk about it in any depth. In institutional cases the pattern is even more pronounced; an analysis of one large institutional abuse population found that more than half of Survivors first disclosed after the age of 50.
Delay can still be misread - the reflex to treat “if it was real, why wait?” as meaningful hasn't disappeared, even as more of the profession, defence counsel included, works to be trauma-informed. But the evidence points the other way. Delay is one of the most well-documented features of abuse, not a flaw in the account.
The other challenge with historical abuse and trauma is the shape of the memory itself. A Survivor may recall the smell of a room vividly but not the year. The timeline may not run in a straight line. Some details are seared in; others are simply gone.
To an untrained eye, that can read as unreliability. In fact, it is consistent with how the brain encodes overwhelming experience. Trauma affects how memory is formed and retrieved - sensory and emotional fragments are often retained with great clarity while sequence, dates, and peripheral detail are not. A fragmented, non-linear account is not evidence that nothing happened. It is frequently evidence of exactly the kind of event at issue.
An expert who understands this can help educate the court - before myths about how memory works creep in and get reframed as doubt.
The core task in a decades-old claim is causal and developmental. Abuse in childhood does not sit in a sealed compartment; it shapes attachment, education, relationships, employment, and health across a lifetime. Establishing psychological injury in these cases means tracing that thread carefully - distinguishing the effects of the abuse from everything else a long life contains, and doing so in a way that will hold up under scrutiny.
That is not work a single short appointment can do well. It requires an expert who can take a full developmental history, understand how trauma presents at 55 as opposed to 15, and connect the two with clinical precision rather than assumption.
There is one more consideration that matters more here than almost anywhere else. Asking a Survivor to revisit abuse they have carried since childhood is not a neutral act. Done carelessly, an assessment can become another harm in a long line of them. Done according to trauma-informed principles - with pacing, predictability, and genuine respect for the person's control over the process - it can produce a more complete and more accurate account precisely because the Survivor feels safe enough to give one.
That is the standard these Survivors deserve. The law has finally made room for Survivors of historical and institutional abuse to seek justice. The expert evidence behind their claims has to be equal to the weight of what they have waited decades to say.
MindSense conducts trauma-informed independent assessments for exactly these files - connecting harm done decades ago to present injury with the accuracy a court expects and the respect a Survivor is owed.