Suits shine light on abuse
Foster care system targeted by Child Victims Act cases
In the early 1980s, David Burgos was sent to Pleasantville Cottage School, a group home for troubled youth in Weschester County. Soon after his arrival, an assistant teacher asked him to stay after class to clean the blackboards.
The teacher sexually abused him, Burgos said in an interview. He never actually cleaned the blackboard, but no one ever said anything. “He told me that he had the power of whether I go home to my mother or not,” Burgos said.
According to a lawsuit Burgos filed last week, he was 13 when the abuse occurred.
Of the nearly 5,000 lawsuits filed since August 2019 under the provisions of New York’s Child Victims Act, those alleging abuse at the hands of institutions such as the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts have drawn the most attention. But another significant category of cases exists, brought by plaintiffs who say they were abused in New York’s foster care system.
Child welfare advocates and experts said the rates of abuse in the foster care system are likely significantly higher than among the general population of children, and existing academic studies seem to back that up. But clear answers are hard to come by: Experts uniformly said that data collection is murky, and what information is collected is often shielded from public view for privacy reasons.
And while the state has general oversight of the system, it’s administered at the county level, and care for kids is often farmed out to nonprofits and churches.
“New York has a thoroughly privatized
child welfare system,” said Marcia Lowery, a lawyer and the executive director of A Better Childhood, which litigates nationally to try to change child welfare policies. “There’s very little oversight that’s exercised, and the oversight that has been set up is extremely inadequate. The monitoring is extremely inadequate, and what happens to kids is really not good.”
According to the state Office for Children and Family Services, across New York there were more than 15,000 kids in foster care at the end of last year, down 37 percent from a decade earlier. More than 6,000 of those foster children are with family members other than their parents, while around 2,300 are in group homes, which are run by nonprofits.
“The safety and wellbeing of children in our care is our top priority,” OCFS spokeswoman Jeannine Smith wrote in an email. “The Child Victims Act has given many people an opportunity to hold accountable those who were entrusted with their care yet caused serious harm, even if that harm occurred decades ago.”
Smith said the agency is always trying to strengthen protections for kids, whether through expanded background checks for caretakers, sharing information between states about foster parents, regularly holding check-ins and maintaining a centralized abuse hotline, which receives 300,000 calls per year — not all of which result in an official report.
“Certainly, New York has a very high rate of maltreatment in foster care, and maltreatment in foster care is often unreported,” Lowery said. “A lot of states have very bad data. So some of it’s reported, but I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
The opportunity afforded by the CVA to shine a light on abuse cases that are beyond the statute of limitations is therefore a rare window into the stories of those who say they were abused as foster kids.
The Times Union reviewed dozens of lawsuits from former New York foster care children who say they were abused while in the system, often at the hands of foster parents or staffers at group homes, and conducted interviews with several plaintiffs.
While no comprehensive list of all CVA lawsuits exists, there are likely hundreds of foster care cases from across the state.
The sweep of the stories in foster care abuse lawsuits are strikingly similar to those naming religious groups or the Scouts as defendants. Stories of priests abusing their stature in the community are well known; the equivalent in the foster care stories is staffers at group homes telling kids they ’ll never get adopted, or foster parents telling their victims there’s no one else they could turn to for help.
“Predators go where the prey is,” said Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
Cycles of abuse
Nowhere are foster care children more vulnerable than in group homes, where rates of abuse are highest.
Staffers are not the only perpetrators: “Kids get preyed on and then they prey on someone else,” Lowery said. “It’s not necessarily (the youthful abuser’s) fault: Little kids get raped by older kids, and then they become sexually abusive themselves, and it just continues.”
Pleasantville Cottage School, where Burgos was allegedly abused, is the defendant in 10 lawsuits filed under the CVA. When a Times Union reporter mentioned to Lowery that the paper had learned of multiple cases of alleged abuse at a group home in the state, she asked unprompted whether it was Pleasantville.
In the 1990s, a 13-yearold at Pleasantville strangled another child to death, and Pleasantville made headlines again in the early 2000s after a staff member was attacked and lit on fire by a group of children.
‘’Really and truly, they are more damaged youngsters, more aggressive, more hostile,’’ a counselor at Pleasantville named Leon Robinson told The New York Times after the 2002 incident.
Eighteen years later, Robinson has been named as an alleged child abuser in a CVA lawsuit, one of four such lawsuits describing sexual abuse from multiple Pleasantville staff members from the 1970s through the ’90s. The Times Union interviewed the plaintiffs for three of the lawsuits, whose stories spanned from 1973 to 1984.
The former children of Pleasantville interviewed by the Times Union described an environment where it was not unusual for staff members to single out children for unobserved attention. They said staff and other children were aware of unusually close relationships between the plaintiffs and their alleged abusers, and the lawsuits allege negligence on the part of Pleasantville in failing to curtail the abuse.
“It’s a very difficult thing to think someone is sexually abusing a little girl. But someone, somebody should have questioned,” said Heide Fromme Kaye, one of the plaintiffs, who is now a teacher.
Kaye says she was abused by Robinson — who she said is now dead — from 1973 to 1976. Robinson started grooming her when she was 11, she said, telling her “I really like you” and inviting her to spend extra time with him.
Eventually, he told her to visit him at his living area. He began to molest her, Kaye said; when she protested, Robinson told her, “Heide, you know there are much worse places you could be.”
Over a period of years, he assaulted and raped her many times, Kaye alleges. She was identified by other children and by the staff members as “belonging ” to Robinson — “Leon’s special little friend,” she recalled the staff saying.
Under the rug
John Bowden said his own abuse began around the same time at the hands of a Pleasantville staffer named Jack, who started by offering 11-yearold Bowden cigarettes.
After that, the man began isolating Bowden, ultimately molesting him and forcing him into oral sex. When Bowden told another staff member, Jack was no longer allowed to see him, Bowden said, but Jack was not fired and there was no further investigation that he was aware of.
Later, a senior “cottage parent” at Pleasantville named Bill began to pay special attention to Bowden, he said. Bill was in charge of the pool, and he arranged to have Bowden assigned to help clean it up and get some free time during the afternoons to swim. He paid Bowden $1 for each lap he could swim, and he gave him ice cream.
“In retrospect now, I realize my mother was not an available mother, so I was already categorized as a vulnerable person,” Bowden said. “She did the best she knew how to do, but her best wasn’t enough. And ... the people who abused me knew that.”
Eventually, Bill sent Bowden to go get towels in a separate room, where he met him and raped him. It happened there many times after that, Bowden said, as well as elsewhere on school grounds and during a field trip to the movies. On one occasion near near the pool, a lifeguard walked in as the adult was abusing the boy.
“I thought that was the moment that I was going to be rescued or whatever,” Bowden said. “But it didn’t happen.”
None of the plaintiffs said their abusers were ever arrested or fired to their knowledge, and all said the abuse they experienced from decades ago still affects them to this day.
Ronald E. Richter, the executive director of the JCCA, which runs Pleasantville, issued a statement to the Times Union in response to its questions. “Since 1822, we have cared for tens of thousands of New York’s most vulnerable children and helped them build and sustain stable and successful lives,” he said. “Our residential programs strive to ensure that children are closely supervised and that any indication of abuse is promptly investigated.”
In the early 1990s, nearly 20 years after her alleged abuse, Kaye said she visited the CEO of Pleasantville, Richard Altman, in his Manhattan office.
She wanted to tell him about the abuse she suffered, and she brought her teaching certificate with her to show Altman that she’d become someone. He offered her a Snapple, heard her out, and then thanked her. After she left, she didn’t hear from Altman again, and to her knowledge Robinson was never punished.
“He swept it under the rug as quickly as he could, and I never heard another word about it,” she said. “I told him the same thing I’m telling you: the truth.”
The JCCA declined to comment on Kaye’s meeting with Altman, or answer whether it had any record of steps taken afterward to investigate Kaye’s claims.
“I look back and I say how sad, how very sad,” Kaye said. “I was this little girl, literally and figuratively. ... It’s just a horrible thing when an adult takes advantage of a child. Childhood should be sacred.”
Predators go where the prey is.” Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
In retrospect now, I realize my mother was not an available mother, so I was already categorized as a vulnerable person. She did the best she knew how to do, but her best wasn’t enough. And ... the people who abused me knew that.”
John Bowden, abuse victim