While the Catholic church has had more than its fair share of accusations and convictions in the arena of pedophilia, they haven’t been the only lecherous men with a long history of having a penchant for young underaged boys. The guys you’re about to be introduced to didn’t discriminate between boys and girls.
In Concord, N.H., the state-run youth detention center is facing widespread pedophilia allegations spanning at least six decades. As many as 230 former detainees have come forward to accuse 150 staffers of physical and sexual abuse during their times of incarceration. Their attorney called the detention center a “magnet for predators.”
In January 2020, attorney Rus Rilee sued New Hampshire while representing three dozen adults who had been abused as children at yet another facility in New Hampshire. This happened between 1982 and 2014 at the Youth Development Center in Manchester.
The 230 former detainees Rilee is now representing say their abuses occurred between 1963 and 2018, and that some of the victims were as young as age seven.
More than half of the staffers are accused of sexual abuse. The allegations include reports of children being gang-raped by counselors. Others say they were beaten and raped at the same time.
Lots of the children were forced to perform sexual acts on each other while the staffers watched and drooled all over themselves. At least one girl ended up pregnant and many others contracted sexually transmitted diseases.
As difficult as it is to imagine, children were burned with cigarettes, had bones broken, were choked, and were literally beaten unconscious. Like caged animals, the counselors would set up fights where the kids would have to duke it out to see who got to eat that day.
Children sometimes spent weeks, and even months, in solitary confinement, often naked and strapped to a bed for any staffer to stop and abuse while passing by.
Children with visible wounds were kept from attending their daily required classes until the wound was no longer noticeable. As a result, a great many of them, especially those who were there long term, are illiterate today. Rilee said, “These broken, shattered children were then unleashed into society with no education, no life skills, and no ability to meaningfully function.”
The Manchester facility involved in the 202 lawsuits has been renamed the Sununu Youth Services Center. It is designed to hold children who have been ordered into a secure institutional setting. Though the facility once held upwards of 100 troubled juveniles, last year the average day-to-day population was only 17.
The director of the state Division for Children, Youth, and Families, Joe Ribsom, won’t comment on the recent allegations concerning the Concord facility. He did however promise the agencies continued cooperation into the criminal investigation.
In a written statement, Ribsom said, “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.”
At this particular point, it hasn’t been revealed just how far up the ladder the abused traveled. It’s already known that certain supervisors joined in on the fun while staffers conveniently found someplace else to be. If it goes beyond them still remains to be known.
In no uncertain terms, Rilee said, “The systemic, governmental child abuse that occurred was allowed to occur because there wasn’t sufficient oversight, and the state was institutionally negligent in their hiring, training, supervision, and retention policies. It’s pretty clear to me that this facility was a magnet for predators.”
One of Rilee’s 230 clients spent two years in the Concord facility. He said he was sexually assaulted more than half a dozen times by the same two staffers. Six staff members all beat him unmercifully at the same time, and he can’t even recall the number of times he was locked in his room for over a week.
As a result of his horrid treatment, he has spent his life in and out of jail. His depression is over-the-top, and he has little sense about what is socially acceptable and what isn’t. If only the staffers would have concentrated on rehabilitating this young man when the stage belonged to them, his life would have turned out much differently.
But the staffers didn’t care. Their demon-possessed desires took priority over these kids in distress whose only real needs were for proper guidance. But those needs were never met.
