Carolyn Surrick, of Annapolis, Maryland, will never forget what it was like when her school “failed” her, enabling two predator-teachers that groomed and raped her as a 7th and 8th grader.

She recently testified on S.B. 0686 before the state Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee about the horrors she endured decades ago at the independent Key School, and in a newly-released survivor-impact video, she details those painful experiences and implores officials, starting with the State Senate committee today, to pass a new law that would finally give Maryland’s childhood sexual abuse survivors, like Carolyn, the right to seek justice.

“You just need to make it possible for us to have our day in court,” she recently told the committee, and in the video, part of the Survivors Stories series, shares that as a young girl she was groomed and raped by music and art teachers, and “conditioned” to think that somehow she engaged in acceptable consensual relations. The “moment of truth”, she recalled, is when the realization set in that she was victimized by predators and, “I was sexually abused.”

Currently, people in Maryland who say they were sexually abused as children cannot sue after they reach the age of 38. The Maryland House has approved remedial legislation in recent years that would have lifted that age limit, but it failed in the state Senate.