A lawsuit alleges decades of abuse at a youth detention center in New Hampshire.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — More than two dozen men and women say they were physically, sexually and emotionally abused as children at New Hampshire’s state-run youth detention center over the course of three decades, according to attorneys who have filed a class action lawsuit on their behalf.

The lawsuit filed Saturday in Merrimack County Superior Court comes six months after two former counselors were charged with repeatedly raping a teenage boy at the Youth Development Center in Manchester in the late 1990s. The victim in that case is now the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by attorneys representing 35 others who say they were abused between 1982 and 2014. The lawsuit alleges that hundreds of children were likely harmed, based on the center’s population census over the years and the length of time the alleged perpetrators were employed.

“This lawsuit seeks to hold the state of New Hampshire and others responsible for the lives they forever destroyed and to bring about system change so that this can never happen again to another child in New Hampshire,” the lawsuit states.

The victims who have come forward were between 11 and 17 at the time, and the perpetrators were both men and women, attorney Rus Rilee told The Associated Press.

Of the 36, approximately 30 allege they suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse, were deprived of an education and kept in solitary confinement, while the rest fall into one or more of those categories, Rilee said.

They were terrorized into keeping quiet, and even those who sought help while sporting black eyes, swollen faces and bleeding genitals were told that the abuse had not occurred, the lawsuit alleges.