Q: Why is it hard to find a lawyer for a civil suit for sexual battery on a child

A: Very few personal injury lawyers are willing to accept cases involving intentional acts like assault and battery because of concerns about the collectibility of any judgment.

Insurance policies uniformly have “intentional act” exclusions. Public policy usually precludes insurance or indemnity contracts that make one person financially responsible for the deliberate intentional harmful actions of another.

So the perpetrator will typically need to be someone of considerable wealth for a personal injury attorney to take such a case.

Second, how much time has passed since the event affects an attorney’s ability to gather admissible evidence. You say molested at 13. If you’re an adult now, at least 5 years have passed. Without an admission by the perpetrator or clear video evidence of the molestation, it’s going to be very difficult to prove.

Third, damages are difficult to quantify. The biggest element of damages in most personal injury cases is loss of earning capacity and medical expenses. It can be more difficult to prove causation in cases like yours where the molestation occurred before you were old enough to work. So a lot depends on the availability of health care records from when you were 13 to the present establishing a consistent and unbroken chain linking your damages to the molestation that occurred when you were 13.

A: How old were you in 2010? That’s important because if you were under the age of 16 at that time or after, then there really isn’t a statute of limitations to file a claim against mom’s boyfriend or even mom. Also were you all three residing in the same home ? That’s significant because homeowners and renters insurance policies have resident exclusion clauses in them. I suspect that nobody wants your case because they feel that there’s no insurance policy that would be a source of recovery. Above are the general rules but there are exceptions. You should contact counsel in a private phone call here in the state of Florida for an exploration of all the facts of your case to determine if there’s a pathway to a civil lawsuit recovery.