Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse and violence against children.
When Maryland lawmakers passed the Child Victims Act in 2023, they hoped it would help unmask sexual predators who never faced justice.
By removing the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse claims, the thinking went, adult survivors would at last be able to name the people who hurt them — and the institutions accused of protecting the abusers — in lawsuits.
The law was more effective than anyone imagined. Two years later, the state of Maryland is facing thousands of claims from people who say they were sexually abused at state-run juvenile detention facilities, some as recently as 2022.
How could you predict that amount of malfeasance and institutional neglect?
Delegate C.T. Wilson, a sexual abuse survivor who spent close to a decade fighting to pass the Child Victims Act
“Never did I think that the number of claimants would be what they were,” Delegate C.T. Wilson, a sexual abuse survivor who spent close to a decade fighting to pass the Child Victims Act, said at a legislative hearing in March. “How could you predict that amount of malfeasance and institutional neglect?”
As many as 6,000 people have sued or are in the process of filing lawsuits against the state over alleged sexual abuse in juvenile detention centers, according to an attorney who is leading the litigation. Many are expected to file in the coming weeks because lawmakers recently walked back parts of the Child Victims Act, limiting the amount of money survivors can win if they sue after May 31.
The claims against the state dwarf the number of victims identified when the Maryland Attorney General’s Office investigated the Archdiocese of Baltimore (more than 600 children) and the number of people who filed claims against the Boy Scouts of America in Maryland (more than 1,000).
With the scope of the allegations starting to come into focus, survivors and advocates want to know whether Maryland will launch an investigation into the history of child sexual abuse in its own facilities.
The leader of the Maryland chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, David Lorenz, said he was blindsided by the number of abuse claims against the state.
“There should be a huge investigation into why this happened,” Lorenz said. “We’ve got a problem, and we’d better figure out what the root cause of this is. There was apparently a total lack of accountability going on there.”
Kevin Pullen, a 41-year-old Baltimore resident who plans to sue over sexual abuse he says he experienced as a teen at the Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School in Baltimore County, said it was shocking to learn so many other people had similar experiences.
“I wasn’t all alone,” Pullen said in an interview with Baltimore Beat. “I did not know I wasn’t the only one going through this type of thing.”
Taken together, the lawsuits present a stunning account of systematic, violent abuse that spanned decades and harmed thousands of children whose care was entrusted to the state, in some cases because they had been abused at home or had no other place to live.
The children — some teenagers, others as young as 7 years old — could not escape the sexual abuse, which pervaded nearly every aspect of life in juvenile detention, according to the lawsuits.
The children — some teenagers, others as young as 7 years old — could not escape the sexual abuse, which pervaded nearly every aspect of life in juvenile detention, according to the lawsuits. Laundry attendants, kitchen aides, counselors, coaches, and even wardens are accused of participating in the abuse, which sometimes dovetailed with official punishments.
At the now-closed Thomas J.S. Waxter Children’s Center in Prince George’s County, children were often subjected to humiliating strip searches and cell lockdowns that gave staff unmonitored access to nude and vulnerable children, the lawsuits allege.
Over and over, survivors report hearing versions of the same phrase: “No one will believe you.” Abusers reminded victims that they were seen as troubled juvenile delinquents who would not receive sympathy or the benefit of the doubt.
Staff members used their authority — and the backing of a punitive criminal justice system — to threaten the children with longer terms in detention, solitary confinement (where children were sometimes kept naked with only a blanket and a mattress), and the loss of phone time or family visitation if they said anything about the abuse, the lawsuits claim.
One woman alleges that a guard threatened to kill her and said other facility staff would assume her death was a suicide.
One woman alleges that a guard threatened to kill her and said other facility staff would assume her death was a suicide. One man said he was placed in lockdown for two weeks after reporting abuse in 2001.
To force compliance, state employees threatened to have their victims transferred to “worse” juvenile detention centers or to adult facilities, to kill the victims’ families, or to let other detained children attack the victims, according to the lawsuits. They bribed children with cigarettes, candy, and other privileges to keep them quiet.
Staffers routinely beat the boys and girls in their care and used handcuffs, pillows, and their larger adult bodies to restrain children during rapes, forced touching, and other forms of abuse, which sometimes happened dozens or hundreds of times over the course of a stay in detention, the lawsuits claim.
Some children contracted sexually transmitted infections from their abusers and had to receive medical treatment. Others say they were provided medication that made them “drowsy” before being sexually assaulted. Many allege that they were abused at more than one state juvenile detention center or by multiple staff members.
Most of the survivors report experiencing long-term mental health and social problems as a result of the abuse.
Pullen said he was abused repeatedly by the same officer at the Hickey School, where he lived for 18 months in the late 1990s. The abuse began with groping, then escalated to forced oral sex and penetration, he said. Pullen was 14 when he went to the school.
Pullen said the officer gave him extra privileges, like letting him pick out a film to watch on movie nights, and also threatened to keep him in detention longer.
“I was terrified,” Pullen said. “I didn’t know who I could talk to about this.”
As he became more fearful and uncomfortable, Pullen acted out in order to be transferred to a new unit away from the abuser. His stay at the school, which was meant to rehabilitate him after his arrest for stealing cars, instead put him on a different path when he got back home.
“I was still angry inside that I let that happen to me,” he said. He spent time in and out of prison as a young man.
Now, Pullen keeps to himself and doesn’t open up to many people, he said. He never told anyone about the abuse because was worried people would look at him differently. But then he heard a commercial about survivors coming forward to file lawsuits over abuse at juvenile detention centers, and decided to tell his story.
His lawsuit will be filed in the coming weeks, along with those of many survivors who are trying to meet a new May 31 deadline for claims under the Child Victims Act. After that date, survivors will be able to win less than half the monetary damages they are eligible for now.
“I’m finally getting this burden off my back,” Pullen said. “It’s helping me regain my power back as far as control of my life.”
The lawsuits allege more broadly that the state of Maryland failed to protect the children from abuse by hiring unqualified staff and doing too little to investigate abuse complaints. They also claim the state had plenty of notice that its juvenile detention centers were dangerous: across several decades, state and federal agencies, lawsuits, and media reports have raised serious concerns about the treatment of children at these facilities.
A 2010 survey from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that more than a third of young men at Garrett County’s Backbone Mountain Youth Center reported experiencing sexual victimization, among the highest rates found in the study.
Todd Mathews, an attorney who has helped lead settlement negotiations with the state, said the claims stretch from the 1960s to the 2020s, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Between 85% and 90% of the Department of Juvenile Services claimants are people of color, Mathews said, which reflects the populations that have historically been sent to juvenile detention centers. To this day, Black children make up 77% of all detained youth in Maryland, though they account for only 30% of the state’s youth population.
Many of the people Mathews represents were placed in juvenile detention for relatively minor, childish crimes, like taking a family car for a joyride, he said. Others ran away from home or foster care because they were being abused there, according to the lawsuits.
Mathews said it is telling that Maryland has not taken steps to investigate the scope of the abuse in its juvenile detention centers.
“I think that the state was mindful of their obligations in doing their Catholic Church investigation, and for human nature reasons, maybe, weren’t willing to admit they had a big problem in their own system,” he said. “Now that they do know, [it has been] a year-plus, and they haven’t taken any action to conduct a survey or report near the length of the Catholic Church.”
In a statement, the Department of Juvenile Services said that “the safety of young people in our care and the wider community is our main concern.”
“DJS cannot comment about pending or active litigation beyond noting that the allegations related to the pending litigation date back decades, with no evidence of recent widespread child abuse in DJS facilities,” the statement continued.
The department does publish regular audits and annual reports under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a 2003 federal law that set standards aimed at ending sexual abuse in correctional institutions.
The most recent annual report from DJS found that both allegations and substantiated claims of sexual abuse and harassment at its facilities have fallen in the past six years.
Mathews said an investigation would protect children in the future and also shed light on how abuse on this scale was able to happen in the past.
“I absolutely believe DJS is doing everything they can to prevent this,” he said. “However, we absolutely still have a system that is seeing this abuse occur, because we have clients where it’s happened in the last three years.”
“I do think it is warranted for there to be an examination, not only of where the system failed decades ago, but where it still needs improvement.”
In an email, a spokesperson for the Maryland Attorney General’s Office said the office “neither confirms nor denies the existence of an investigation” unless required by law.
The AG’s office has said little about the lawsuits, which is typical while litigation is pending. In a document seeking assistant counsel to help handle the flood of cases, the office said more than 1,500 plaintiffs had filed claims as part of 38 lawsuits involving juvenile detention facilities, and that it expected as many as 4,000 people to bring claims against the state.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys now estimate that number will be even higher. The vast majority of the claimants have filed using pseudonyms, like “John Doe,” to protect their identities.
The juvenile detention cases differ from the investigation into the Archdiocese of Baltimore because the Maryland Attorney General’s Office represents state agencies in court. The Department of Juvenile Services is the AG’s client, creating a conflict. But lawyers said an investigation would be useful, even if it were conducted by an independent agency or outside firm.
“It would be helpful, especially [for] criminal prosecution, if somebody could aggregate all the stories,” said Thomas Yost, an attorney whose law firm is representing Pullen. If the lawsuits don’t settle, attorneys will eventually be able to receive documents, depositions, and other materials from the state as they make their case, but that’s different from a broader systemic investigation.
State leaders said little about the sprawling scandal during the recent legislative session, focusing instead on a bill to limit Maryland’s financial liability from these lawsuits amid a budget crisis.
Lawmakers worried that the state could face several billion dollars in liability from the DJS claims. Los Angeles County recently reached a record $4 billion settlement with nearly 7,000 plaintiffs who said they were abused in juvenile detention centers and foster care.
The new Maryland legislation slashed the amount of money that abuse survivors can win in court by more than half, from $890,000 to $400,000 in lawsuits against public institutions, if they file under the Child Victims Act after May 31. For private institutions, like the Catholic church, the cap is being reduced from $1.5 million to $700,000.
The bill also clarified that survivors can only receive up to that cap once, regardless of how many times they were abused — an addition that plaintiffs’ attorneys say is likely unconstitutional — and limited the amount of fees that attorneys can receive in these cases.
The bill inspired heated debate and backlash from survivors and their attorneys, but ultimately passed during the final days of the session. Gov. Wes Moore signed the bill into law over the objection of plaintiffs’ lawyers.
In an emailed statement, Moore’s office said the governor “acknowledges the trauma survivors of child sexual assault have endured and the difficult and unprecedented circumstances surrounding this legislation.”
“The general assembly has carefully crafted legislation that will continue to allow the survivors to seek justice,” the statement continued.
The office did not respond to a question about whether an investigation into the DJS claims is warranted.
Yost said that lawmakers knew the state would likely face some lawsuits over abuse at juvenile detention centers, but did not realize the extent of the problem when they first passed the Child Victims Act.
Instead of dealing with the problem, Yost said, legislators chose to change the law and limit the amount of money survivors can receive. And because of the new May 31 deadline, survivors who haven’t already filed their claims will have to rush to court in the next few weeks.
“The real tragedy here is that you did a lot more damage than you imagined you did, right?” Yost said. “Do something about that instead of withdrawing compensation from the people that you promised it to.”