Time does not heal all wounds.

It doesn’t repair the crippling psychological injuries suffered by childhood sex abuse victims, for example. And if it can’t do that, it shouldn’t protect their abusers from the anxiety of wondering if they’ll be caught.

Those who perpetrate unconscionable evil upon fragile children shouldn’t be allowed to play a waiting game that lets them escape accountability by avoiding discovery for an arbitrary number of years.

Under current law, though, the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of children is generally 10 years. It can vary according to a mixture of circumstances but if charges haven’t been brought before the victim turns 24, at the latest, they can’t be brought at all. Even though, in many cases, it’s at that age or much later that the guilt, denial and emotional confusion dissipate enough to let the victim face up to a long-repressed secret.

The futility of seeking justice at that point will change if legislation introduced this week by Washington state Sen. Chris Marr of Spokane becomes law. The measure, Senate Bill 5817, would remove the statute of limitations that now applies to sex abuse crimes against children.

In 2005, the American Psychological Association released a report in which researchers from Johns Hopkins, Southern Methodist and Cornell universities analyzed earlier studies of child sex abuse experiences. The authors concluded that 60-70 percent of adults who had been sexually abused as children don’t recall ever revealing what happened to them and only 10-18 percent recall that their cases were reported to authorities.

Those figures aren’t surprising, given that most child sexual abuse victims know their assailants and tend to see them as people with authority and power. Teachers, clergy, youth organization leaders, relatives including parents and siblings, family friends. People, in other words, whose words carry weight when they say “Don’t tell” or “It’s OK.”

Compound that by the instances of children who do report, only to be disbelieved. After the chain of trust-eroding experiences grows long enough, children are less likely than ever to blow the whistle, and more likely to blame themselves.

There are plausible reasons for a statute of limitations. When the state steps forward with a convincing but decades-old case, the suspect’s constitutional right to an effective defense is hampered by foggy memories and missing evidence. In addition, there’s what Gonzaga Law School professor Brooks Holland calls a “societal interest” in giving law enforcement authorities an incentive to investigate crimes promptly.

Yet for certain extreme offenses society has decided to remove any statute of limitations. Those who commit murder, set deadly fires or flee the scene of a traffic fatality, for instance, cannot be saved by the bell. They have to worry the rest of their lives about getting caught. And punished.

It’s reasonable to carve out exceptions to the statute of limitations in egregious cases like those, all of which so far involve mortal acts.

Children who are sexually victimized by predatory adults shouldn’t be denied the same level of justice merely because they didn’t die.