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Fifty people allege they were sexually abused as children while incarcerated in Maryland’s juvenile justice system, one as young as 7, in a suite of lawsuits filed the day a new state law took effect.
The claims allege rampant sexual abuse of young people in six of Maryland’s juvenile justice facilities over five decades, making Maryland’s government the latest defendant in a reckoning over decades-old allegations sparked by legislative change.
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The lawsuits allege repeated rape or molestation of children in state custody, neglect by the state in failing to prevent the abuse, and a lack of effective procedures to monitor staffers with patterns or histories of illegal behavior. Some children were abused in their bedrooms with the doors locked from the outside, the lawsuits allege.
“Unfortunately, due to the Department’s abysmal lack of management and oversight, thousands of youngsters have been harmed rather than helped as they became the prey of sadistic staff whom they could not escape,” lawyers wrote in a lawsuit alleging abuses against 11 people at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore.
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“Having taken these children’s liberty, the State then paid the personnel who relentlessly raped, sodomized, beat, threatened, and tortured them in nightmarish ways. All while turning a blind eye for decades,” the lawsuit said.
The state of Maryland and its Department of Juvenile Services, as well as its predecessor agencies, are the defendants. Lawyers said they have several hundred additional clients, most of whom they expect to add as plaintiffs.
The Department of Juvenile Services released a statement saying that the agency was reviewing the lawsuit. “DJS takes allegations of sexual abuse of children in our care very seriously and we are working hard to provide decent, humane and rehabilitative environments for youth committed to the Department,” it said.
In just 24 hours, litigation alleging abuse and lack of accountability has been filed against a private school, Catholic parishes, the Archdiocese of Washington and now the state government, as lawyers make cases with a new legal avenue to seek justice. Anticipating a wave of settlements it can’t pay, the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy Friday.
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The Maryland Child Victims Act took effect Sunday, eliminating the civil statute of limitations that once required many child victims of sexual assault to have filed lawsuits by their early 20s. States across the country have taken similar steps to expand access to civil suits. Maryland’s new law affords victims the right to file civil lawsuits at any time against both attackers and institutions that may have harbored them. It provides for damages up to $1.5 million for lawsuits against private institutions and $890,000 against public ones.
Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, facing possible slew of abuse lawsuits, files for bankruptcy
For victims, the lawsuits also offer an opportunity to instigate a public reckoning against alleged abusers and people who failed to protect children.
“These bastards know what they did,” plaintiff Claudia McLain, 49, said in an interview last week. She is the only named plaintiff in the lawsuits filed against Maryland and its juvenile detention centers.
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McLain said when she was 13, in 1987, she was put in state custody for stealing a bicycle. She said she was raped by state employees at least 15 times over the ensuing months.
One of her rapists stood over her shoulder while her mother came to visit, McLain said, delaying her opportunity to reveal the abuse. When her mother was able to raise concerns, she said, nothing happened.
“I’m not sitting here to gain nothing. My lawyer didn’t offer me nothing,” she said. “They need to be exposed. The world needs to know what is going on behind these juvenile facilities. Period.”
The six juvenile facilities named in six different but coordinated lawsuits filed Sunday have well-documented histories of mistreating youth in other ways, including scandals that at times prompted probes by the U.S. Justice Department and others.
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The Washington Post could not verify the details of the allegations or the circumstances that brought victims into state custody because juvenile records are sealed. The lawyers did not name the state workers accused of abuse in the lawsuit and plan to use the civil discovery process to document the allegations and how much the state knew about them.
“It’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity to do the right thing,” said Sharon Iskra, McLain’s lawyer, of the firm Bailey Glasser.
After the new statute of limitations law passed in April, her firm and others advertised on social media for victims to come forward.
Sunday’s lawsuits came from a group of lawyers from four firms who banded together. The lawyers hired three social workers to help handle the response in ways meant to avoid retraumatizing callers, Iskra said. “On every level, it’s our effort, it’s our hope, our desire — and we’re doing everything we can — to make this a trauma-informed intake process.”
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The 50 plaintiffs in Sunday’s lawsuits range from a man who says he was molested in 1962 at the age of 7, to a woman who says she was repeatedly raped at the age of 12 in an administrator’s office in 1984, to a man who said he was sexually assaulted at 16 by two separate perpetrators in 2011 or 2012.
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All plaintiffs besides McLain are identified by the pseudonyms John Doe and Jane Doe. Each says he or she suffered abuse at one of six Maryland detention centers: the Montrose School, closed in 1988; the Thomas J.S. Waxter Children’s Center, closed last year; and the still-operating Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School, Cheltenham Youth Detention Center and Victor Cullen Center. The lawsuits are filed in the four county circuit courts that are home to the facilities: Baltimore County Circuit Court; Anne Arundel County Circuit Court; Prince George’s County Circuit Court and Frederick County Circuit Court.
One plaintiff said she was 15 years old when she was sexually abused inside the Montrose School in 1975. She alleges a caretaker, who the lawsuit does not identify, got her alone in the infirmary and raped her. She said he would give her commissary money for sexual favors and “if she did not comply, he forced himself onto her regardless,” one of the lawsuits said.
The lawsuits’ allegations come after previous well-documented reports on chaos and abuse inside the detention centers. The century-old Montrose School in Reisterstown had long drawn criticism from youth advocates before it was closed in 1988. The cries for closure had reached a peak in 1986 when a youth at the facility hanged himself in solitary confinement.
In 2004, for example, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found “a deeply disturbing degree” of violence against youth by staff at the Cheltenham and Hickey facilities. The report noted female staffers at both facilities had been found to have engaged in inappropriate relationships with male residents.
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In 2006, the division found serious and pervasive youth-on-youth violence inside the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center and cited chronic staffing shortages as a contributing factor. In 2021, a former female staffer at the Victor Cullen Center was criminally charged with having had sexual contact there with a teenage boy.
“These children, they live with it and they hide it and they think it’s their fault. … And they go into adulthood still thinking that,” Iskra said.
One plaintiff, who declined to be identified in court filings, said he felt targeted because the guards at Hickey knew he was one of the kids who never got visits or care packages. The Post verified his identity but does not publicly identify child victims of sexual assault without their consent.
The man said his mother had committed suicide when he was 13 and he never knew his father. By 15, in 1985, he had been arrested for stealing cars and sent to Hickey.
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A guard started giving him care packages with fresh soap, socks, his own toothpaste, some popcorn and a little candy. The man said he felt like he had no choices when the guard pulled him out of playing basketball games and took him to the laundry room or an office and forced him to submit to sexual acts once or twice a week.
When another guard walked in on them in the shower, the man said, the second guard left after the abuser said there was nothing happening. He said he was threatened with being sent to an adult prison if he spoke up.
The man said he never told his wife of 28 years until after he talked about it with a lawyer. He still hasn’t told their children.
McLain also kept most of her abuse silent, discussing it with her therapist and a close friend, she said, but never with anyone else until her friend saw the advertisement and suggested McLain talk to a lawyer.
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In an interview last week, McLain said that by the time she was a middle-schooler in West Baltimore’s Walbrook neighborhood, she’d been arrested for a series of petty offenses. She was the baby of the family, and McLain said her mother encouraged officers to keep her overnight in an act of tough love.
She landed at the Hickey school, and said it wasn’t long into her stay that a staff member came into her room at night and raped her in what became regular abuse “a couple times a weeks” that would fuel a lifetime of struggle.
“You’re lying there, you’re sleeping and you hear that key turning,” she recalled. “And you just hear, ‘You know what time it is.’ There’s nothing you can say. Nothing you can do. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to go. So you have to. You have to.”
She said she could hear other girls being raped in their rooms at night after it happened to her. When she complained, she said she lost chances to call home or receive visitors. She said she slit her wrists in an attempted suicide. She said she felt like the abuse was an open secret, but none of the victims had credibility with the administrators: “I am the bad one because I’m there. Doesn’t matter what I say.”
When she finally returned home to what she noted was a two-parent, loving family of five kids, she found herself newly aggressive and combative toward her doting three older brothers. She got in physical fights with boys at school, proving to herself that no one could dominate her.
“Just imagine you’re young and your virginity is taken by someone that you’re not willing to give it to,” she said. “You have to live with it, live with it every single day.”
She said she only started to come to terms with the abuse well into adulthood and hopes speaking out will help others. Her friend texted her encouragement on her way to discussing it publicly for the first time, telling her, “set your ownself free, and you could help set other people free.”
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