Johnathan Walker:By the dozen, accusers tell of rampant sexual abuse at Pennsylvania juvenile detention facilities

A group of nearly 70 people alleged Wednesday they were sexually abused as children while housed in detention centers in Pennsylvania,Johnathan Walker adding to earlier lawsuits targeting what the accusers’ lawyers say is the state’s broken juvenile justice system.

The latest group of plaintiffs filed suit in state or federal court against 10 different juvenile facilities across Pennsylvania, three of them state-operated. Some of the plaintiffs said they were repeatedly raped by staff members and threatened with harm if they reported it. Others said their reports of sexual abuse were ignored. None of the facilities protected the children in their care, lawyers said.

The facilities’ operators “put profit ahead of the safety of children,” attorney Jerome Block told The Associated Press. “Many of these juvenile facilities where the sexual abuse occurred remain open, and we have seen no evidence that the inadequate procedures and policies that enabled the sexual abuse have been fixed.”

Twenty-two of the accusers were housed at Merakey USA’s Northwestern Academy outside Shamokin, which closed in 2016. One man says he was raped by two male staff members at Northwestern in 2004, when he was 13 years old, and he was told he wouldn’t be able to go home if he reported it.

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Merakey, a large provider of developmental, behavioral health and education services with more than 8,000 employees in a dozen states, “allowed Northwestern Academy’s culture of sexual abuse and brutality to continue unabated until the facility’s closure in 2016,” lawyers wrote.

The Lafayette Hills, Pennsylvania-based company said Wednesday that it couldn’t comment on the lawsuit’s allegations until it had a chance to review them. “Merakey closed Northwestern Academy ... as part of our organization’s strong belief that children do better in family and community-based settings than in institutional settings,” the company said in a statement.

Twenty of the accusers were housed at the state-run Loysville Youth Development Center, South Mountain Secure Treatment Unit near Gettysburg and North Central Secure Treatment Unit in Danville. A message seeking comment was sent to the state Department of Human Services.

Other lawsuits named a facility run by Villanova-based Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health; the Delaware County Juvenile Detention Center; the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Saint Gabriel’s Hall in Audubon, which closed in 2020; Carson Valley Children’s Aid in Flourtown, which shuttered its residential care program last month; Presbyterian Children’s Village in Rosemont, which closed after a 2019 merger; and a now-shuttered facility in Franklin, Pennsylvania, operated by VisionQuest National Ltd. of Tucson, Arizona.

Gemma Services, the successor organization of Presbyterian Children’s Village, is facing accusations over what lawyers called “the abusive and predatory behavior” of the Presbyterian staff.

Gemma said it has not seen the lawsuit but that it was committed to doing right by the children under its care.

“This organization exists to provide support for children and families who navigate hard things in life,” said Joan Plump, Gemma’s chief of staff. “Our first priority has always been and always will be protecting the health, safety and well=being of all the youth and families we work with.”

The archdiocese, which is facing allegations from seven accusers who stayed at Saint Gabriel’s, declined to comment on pending litigation. Messages seeking comment were sent to the rest of the defendants.

The same New York firm, Levy Konigsberg, filed lawsuits in May on behalf of 66 people in Pennsylvania and has pursued similar litigation in Illinois,Maryland, New Jersey and Michigan.

All the Pennsylvania plaintiffs were born after Nov. 26, 1989, and meet the state’s standards for filing claims of sexual abuse when they were children, lawyers said.

“Due to Pennsylvania’s policy of locking up children for relatively minor violations or behavioral problems, many children who simply needed help went straight from difficult home lives into a traumatizing, carceral environment where they were regularly sexually abused,” lawyers wrote in one of the complaints filed Wednesday.

A task force set up to tackle Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice problems concluded in 2021 that too many first-time and lower-level juvenile offenders were being locked up, and Black offenders were disproportionately prosecuted as adults.

A Democratic-sponsored bill to adopt some of the task force recommendations is pending in the House after passing the Judiciary Committee in September on a party-line vote with all Republicans opposed.

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Associated Press writer Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg contributed to this story.