Hundreds claim decades of abuse by staffers
Abuse allegations against New Hampshire’s state-run youth detention center have grown to 230 men and woman.
CONCORD, N.H. >> Abuse allegations against New Hampshire’s state-run youth detention center now span six decades, with 150 staffers during that time accused of physically or sexually harming 230 children at a facility the victims’ attorney calls a “magnet for predators.”
Rus Rilee sued the state in January 2020 on behalf of three dozen adults who alleged they were abused as children at the Youth Development Center in Manchester between 1982 and 2014. He now represents 230 clients who say they were abused between 1963 and 2018, when they were ages 7 to 18.
As the number of years, accusers and alleged perpetrators has swelled, so, too, has the sickening nature of the allegations. While details beyond the updated number of accusers and time span aren’t included in latest court documents, Rilee plans to add his clients’ accounts to the complaint and described them to The Associated
Press:
Of the 150 accused staffers, more than half are accused of sexual abuse, Rilee said. Children were gang raped by counselors, beaten while being raped and forced to sexually abuse each other, he said. Some ended up with sexually transmitted diseases; one ended up pregnant.
Staff members choked children, beat them unconscious, burned them with cigarettes and broke their
bones, Rilee said. Counselors set up “fight clubs” and forced kids to compete for food. Children were locked in solitary confinement for weeks or months, sometimes shackled or strapped naked to their beds. Kept away from classrooms while their injuries healed, some can’t read or write today, he said.
“These broken, shattered children were then unleashed into society with no education, no life skills and no ability to meaningfully function,” said Rilee.
The Manchester facility, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center after former Gov. John H. Sununu, serves children ordered to a secure institutional setting by the juvenile justice system. The average population last year was just 17 residents overseen by about 90 employees, though it once housed upward of 100 youths and employed a larger staff.
Joe Ribsam, director of the state Division for Children, Youth and Families, said the agency continues to cooperate with a broad criminal investigation into the center launched by the attorney general’s office in 2019. He did not comment on the new allegations.
“The facility’s policies and systems that protect the youth receiving care include full compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act and security cameras throughout the facility to provide additional sets of eyes on staff and student interactions,” Ribsam said in a written statement.