Virginia Institutional Abuse Attorneys
Most people arrive at this page with one question: can the organization be held responsible, or only the person who caused the harm? In Virginia it can often be both. An institutional abuse attorney looks at who the organization hired, who it kept on and what it did once it had reason to worry. Gray Broughton is a veteran led trial firm, and Sharif Gray is a former prosecutor.
Recognized. Reviewed. Trusted.
A civil case and a criminal case are two separate things, and they don’t depend on each other. The organization is usually where the insurance and the records are, which often makes it the defendant a recovery can actually come from. This page walks through the claims, the immunities and the deadlines. Talk to us first, confidentially, without filing anything.
Do you need a criminal charge first?
No. A civil claim doesn’t wait on a charge, and it doesn’t need a conviction. Virginia’s abuse claim deadlines say nothing about a conviction, which is a fair reading of the text rather than something a court has ruled.
One correction worth having, because most pages get it wrong. What Virginia law makes usable in the civil case is a guilty plea, a no contest plea, a finding of guilt in absentia or a forfeiture. A conviction after a trial is a separate question.
A prosecutor decides whether to charge. You decide whether to sue.
When can you sue an organization in Virginia?
Negligent hiring and retention
Virginia lets you sue an organization for its own carelessness in choosing the people it puts in a room with your family, and in keeping them there. The Supreme Court of Virginia has said a charity can be liable for ordinary negligence in selecting and retaining its staff.
There’s one claim Virginia doesn’t recognize, and knowing it saves time. The court has declined to create a general duty of reasonable care in supervising employees. That matters less than it sounds.
Facts that feel like a supervision failure are usually retention facts, and the real question is what the organization knew about this person, and when. The personnel file and earlier complaints answer it.
When an employee acted on purpose
An employer isn’t automatically clear because the employee meant to do it. Virginia has refused to treat an intentional assault as categorically outside the scope of employment. Once you show the person was an employee, the law presumes he was acting within his job, and the employer has to come forward with evidence that he wasn’t. A deliberate act can still fall inside the scope.
That decision came early in a case, at the pleading stage. It says the question couldn’t be settled as a matter of law on that record. It doesn’t say the employer loses.
Can a church, school or nonprofit claim immunity?
Charitable immunity
Sometimes, and it has limits worth knowing. A Virginia charity is immune from ordinary negligence claims brought by the people it serves. It is not immune to a visitor or a stranger with no beneficial relationship to it, and not for gross negligence or willful and wanton conduct. And it can still be liable for its own negligence in selecting and retaining staff, which is why that claim survives when others don’t.
Schools, counties and cities
A school board isn’t a state agency and its employees aren’t state employees, so the Virginia Tort Claims Act isn’t the route against one. That act doesn’t reach a county, city or town at all. A claim against a locality carries its own short notice deadline, in the table below.
How long do you have to file an VA institutional abuse claim?
Virginia doesn’t use one deadline for these cases. Which one applies depends on what happened and how old the survivor was.
| How long you have | When it applies |
|---|---|
| Two years | Most injury claims, whatever the legal theory behind them |
| 20 years | Injury from sexual abuse during childhood, or while you were unable to manage your own affairs |
| 10 years | Sexual abuse in other circumstances, where the claim arose on or after July 1, 2020 |
| 15 years | Sexual abuse of someone 18 or older by a person in a position of trust who held influence over their life |
| Six months | Written notice to a county, city or town before a claim against it. Much shorter than the rest, and the one people miss |
Two things can move those dates. Being a child at the time, or being unable to manage your own affairs, can pause the clock for as long as that lasts, including on the six month notice to a locality.
And for childhood sexual abuse, the clock may not start on the day it happened. It can start later, when a licensed physician, psychologist or clinical psychologist first connects the injury to what was done. Only those three professions count for that purpose. Many survivors reach that point years afterward, which is the reason the rule exists.
No one should calculate a deadline from a website.
The defense to expect, and what a jury can award
Virginia doesn’t split fault between the parties. If the defense proves the injured person was even partly to blame for the harm, that alone can end the claim. It stays available even where the organization broke a safety code, because Virginia has not adopted the rule that would take it away in that situation. A child under seven can’t be held careless at all.
On the other side of the ledger, punitive damages against all defendants combined are capped at $350,000, and the jury is never told about the cap.
Where institutional abuse happens
Nursing homes and assisted living
Child daycares | Adult daycares
Schools, churches and youth organizations
Sexual assault of an adult
Group homes, foster care and other settings
For these types of cases, the questions are generally the same wherever it happened: who did the organization hire, who did it keep on after a complaint, and what did it do once it had reason to worry.
Claims also come out of:
- Group homes and residential treatment programs for children and teenagers
- Foster placements, and the agencies that arranged and oversaw them
- Juvenile detention and other secure facilities
- Psychiatric hospitals and behavioral health units
- Day support, sponsored residential and other programs serving adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities
- Colleges and universities, including student housing and athletics
- Camps, after school programs and the transportation any of these run
- Employers, where the person who caused the harm was on the job at the time
If your situation isn’t on that list, it doesn’t mean the answer is no. What decides the claim is the organization’s own choices, not what the place is called. One situation is a different claim: harm caused by a stranger rather than by someone the organization put there. That’s negligent security, and it turns on what the property owner knew about crime on the property.
Contact a Virginia Institutional Abuse Attorney Today
You can ask what your options are without deciding to use them. The first conversation is confidential and doesn’t require you to file anything. Before that point, we can explain what a case actually involves, what it would ask you to share and what privacy protections exist.
Call 804-669-9899 today for your free, no obligation consultation with a VA institutional abuse lawyer.
Recent Case Results
These are case results from other Virginia injury matters. No result predicts what another claim is worth.
$10,000,000
Gray Broughton represented a seven-year-old boy who suffered a traumatic brain injury and lost his right leg above the knee after his family’s car was rear-ended by a pick-up truck hauling a utility trailer. Gray Broughton was able to settle his case for $10,000,000 shortly after filing suit. The client’s net proceeds were structured to ensure that he can be compensated for life. He is a tremendous young man who has overcome daunting odds. We wish him all the best for his future.
$1,250,000
Gray Broughton represented an attorney who suffered a traumatic brain injury after his car was struck by a commercial vehicle. After missing a year of work and undergoing intensive therapy, he was able to make a full recovery and return to work. Gray Broughton was able to settle his case for $1,250,000 shortly before depositions.
$750,000.
Gray Broughton represented an 83-year-old woman who slipped and fell on a restaurant floor. The fall broke her right shoulder in three places; it also broke her right hip. Through his investigation, Gray Broughton was able to prove that the restaurant had not been mopping its floors properly and knew that its floors were abnormally slick. Gray Broughton settled her case two months before trial for $750,000.
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Important: This page provides general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading this content does not create an attorney-client relationship. Outcomes vary based on the specific facts of each case.
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