Yes. If you were sexually abused while in foster care in California, you can generally bring a civil lawsuit for that harm. The claim can name the person who committed the abuse. It can also name the private foster family agency or the county child welfare agency whose failures allowed it. Your deadline depends mainly on when the abuse happened.
Many people who were in foster care as children do not look up any of this until they are adults, often many years later. Some assume it is too late, or that nothing can be done against a county or a state system. California law answers those questions more directly than many people expect. This article takes them in order: who can be named, how the deadlines work, the rules for public agencies, what a claim can seek, and what the process involves.
Yes: California Law Allows Survivors to Sue Foster Care Agencies and Caregivers
A civil lawsuit is a case a survivor brings in court to seek financial compensation for harm. It is separate from a criminal case, in which a prosecutor seeks punishment. A survivor does not need a criminal case, a conviction, or a police report to file a civil claim. The page on civil and criminal abuse cases explains the difference in more detail.
In foster care cases, potential defendants usually fall into three groups:
- The individual who committed the abuse. This may be a foster parent, another adult or older youth in the household, or staff at a group home or other placement.
- A private foster family agency. These are agencies licensed by the state to recruit, approve, and support foster homes.
- Public agencies. These include the county child welfare agency responsible for the child and, in some circumstances, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS).
California runs child welfare at the county level, under state oversight. In practice, agencies such as the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA), and the Alameda County Social Services Agency make placement and supervision decisions. CDSS licenses facilities and oversees the system statewide.
Suing a public agency follows somewhat different procedural rules than suing a private person or a private agency. Those rules are explained below. For childhood sexual abuse, they are often less restrictive than survivors have been told.
Who Can Be Named in a Foster Care Sexual Abuse Lawsuit
Liability in these cases often reaches past the individual abuser. Section 340.1 of the Code of Civil Procedure expressly covers claims against "any person or entity who owed a duty of care to the plaintiff, if a wrongful or negligent act by that person or entity was a legal cause of the childhood sexual assault." A duty of care is a legal obligation to act reasonably to protect someone from foreseeable harm. Agencies responsible for a child in foster care generally owe that child such a duty.
The individual abuser faces direct liability for the abuse itself.
A private foster family agency may be liable under negligence theories, including:
- negligent placement (approving or placing a child in a home the agency knew or should have known was unsafe)
- failure to screen caregivers adequately before approving them
- negligent supervision (failing to reasonably monitor a placement or the people in it, so that harm could occur)
- failure to investigate or act on complaints
A county child welfare agency may face claims for negligent supervision of a placement, failing to respond to reports of abuse, or failing to remove a child from a dangerous home. Claims against a county are subject to the Government Claims Act and to government immunity rules, both covered in later sections.
CDSS may be named in appropriate cases involving state-level licensing or oversight failures. Whether a defendant is a county or the State itself matters, because the procedural rules differ.
Multiple defendants can be named in the same lawsuit. That is common in foster care cases, where responsibility for a child was shared among a household, an agency, and a county. The page on childhood sexual abuse covers institutional defendants more broadly.
California's Statute of Limitations for Childhood Sexual Abuse Claims
A statute of limitations is the deadline for filing a lawsuit. For childhood sexual abuse, California's deadline is set by Code of Civil Procedure section 340.1. Which rule applies depends on when the abuse happened.
Abuse on or after January 1, 2024. The statute now reads: "There is no time limit for the commencement of any of the following actions for recovery of damages suffered as a result of childhood sexual assault." That covers claims against the abuser, against any person or entity whose negligence was a legal cause of the abuse, and against any person or entity whose intentional act was a legal cause. The no-time-limit rule applies only to abuse occurring on and after January 1, 2024.
Abuse on or before December 31, 2023. These claims are governed by the law as it read on December 31, 2023. Under that law, a survivor generally may file until age 40, or within five years of discovering (or reasonably should have discovered) that a psychological injury was caused by the abuse, whichever is later. The 2024 change did not revive any claim that had already expired.
The five-year period is known as the discovery rule: the clock runs from the date of discovery, not the date the abuse happened. Many survivors do not connect later difficulties, such as anxiety, depression, or trouble with relationships, to what happened in childhood until years or decades afterward. The law was written with that in mind.
AB 218 (2019) set the age-40 and five-year rule and also opened a three-year revival window, January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2022, for claims that had previously expired. That window has closed. Claims filed during it may still be moving through the courts.
AB 2777 (2022), the Sexual Abuse and Cover Up Accountability Act, created a separate window for sexual assault that happened when the survivor was an adult. It is not a childhood abuse provision. For a person whose abuse occurred after turning 18, for example in extended foster care, different deadlines apply, and the overview of the California statute of limitations describes them.
Section 340.1 also requires a plaintiff who is 40 or older when the case is filed to have certificates of merit filed by the attorney and by a licensed mental health practitioner who is not the survivor's treating therapist. The same section contains a cover-up provision, described in the damages section below.
Timing turns on specific dates and facts. An attorney can confirm which rule applies to a particular situation.
The Government Claims Act: A Required Step Before Suing a Public Agency
The Government Claims Act, which begins at Government Code section 905, generally requires a person to file a written claim with a local public entity before suing it for money. That claim is often called a government tort claim. For most kinds of injury, the deadline to present it is short, commonly six months, and missing it can bar a lawsuit that would otherwise be valid.
Childhood sexual abuse is treated differently. Section 905 lists claims that do not have to be presented, and subdivision (m) includes "Claims made pursuant to Section 340.1 of the Code of Civil Procedure for the recovery of damages suffered as a result of childhood sexual assault." Section 340.1 itself states that such a claim is not required to be presented to any government entity before suit. A local entity also cannot impose its own claim procedure in place of the statute.
This exemption has no condition tied to when the abuse happened. AB 218 removed an earlier date limit, and section 905 makes that change retroactive. In practical terms, for a childhood sexual abuse claim against a county agency such as Los Angeles County DCFS or the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency, the six-month claim deadline generally does not apply.
One distinction matters here. Section 905 governs local public entities, such as counties and school districts. Claims against the State of California, including state departments, are presented under a different section that contains no such exemption. For a state defendant, the exemption comes from section 340.1 itself, and it reaches only abuse on or after January 1, 2024. Where an agency's status is unclear, the first question is whether it is a local entity or part of the State, and an attorney can usually answer that from the records.