The Larry Nassar Hearings: Victim Impact Statements, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Role of Catharsis in Criminal Law

Rosemary Ardman

Through a close analysis of the Nassar hearings, this Comment will explore the relationship between victim impact statements, catharsis, and society’s response to child sexual abuse. Victim impact statements have been subject to vigorous scholarly debate since their inception, celebrated by supporters—a rare coalition of progressives and conservatives—for humanizing criminal law, and attacked by critics for making impossible promises to victims and encouraging a turn to revenge within the criminal system. This Comment makes four contributions to this extensive body of scholarship. First, it explores how the idea of catharsis has informed the law’s understanding of the benefits of victim impact statements. Second, it uses the legal concept of community catharsis to present a novel critique of the statements’ expressive value. Third, it shows how the role of victims at Nassar’s sentencing lays bare a deep cultural ambivalence toward child sexual abuse—competing disgust and fascination, fear and indifference. Fourth, it presents an alternative model of victim impact testimony that combines the strengths of both restorative justice and the traditional criminal process.

This Comment will ultimately argue that we should be skeptical of the public catharsis of events like Nassar’s sentencing, which can disguise prurience as social change. Though lauded as a sign of cultural transformation, the outrage and sensationalism that surrounded the hearings functioned more to absolve the public of its own complicity in child sexual abuse. Nassar’s prison sentence was just, but the use of victim impact statements in the hearings encouraged the audience to fixate on him as a scapegoat rather than confront the political, social, and familial norms that facilitated his crimes. For this reason, this Comment contends, victim impact statements should be separated from the sentencing process into a parallel proceeding capable of illuminating the culpability of a wider range of actors.