Between 2022 and 2023, nearly 600 survivors sued Los Angeles County over sexual abuse at its juvenile facilities — Barry J. Nidorf (Sylmar) Juvenile Hall, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, Central Juvenile Hall, and Camp Kilpatrick among them — describing staff who abused the youth in their custody, traded contraband for sexual favors, and retaliated against anyone who reported it. In February 2025, more than two dozen survivors sued San Diego County over abuse at Camp Barrett, Rancho del Campo, and the Girls Rehabilitation Facility spanning 1970 to 2022, some of it on a near-daily basis. The pattern repeats across the state: abuse in cells, showers, and bathrooms and during strip searches, by probation officers, correctional officers, counselors, and teachers who used threats of physical harm, extended confinement, or retaliation to keep children silent. Criminal charges have followed against staff in Riverside, Ventura, San Bernardino, Alameda, Imperial, San Mateo, Kern, Santa Clara, Fresno, Monterey, San Joaquin, and Merced counties. One survivor was 10 years old.
The same failures run through California's residential treatment centers, behavioral health facilities, group homes, and foster placements: operators and placing agencies that hired without adequate screening, gave adults unsupervised access to children who could not leave, ignored or buried reports, moved known abusers rather than removing them, and left children with no safe way to tell anyone. In foster care, liability often turns on notice — a county or agency that had already received a report about the home or the abuser, or that placed a child with someone previously charged with child sexual abuse, and left the child there anyway. These claims do not depend on the abuser ever having been arrested, charged, or convicted.
If you were sexually abused as a minor in a California juvenile hall, camp, treatment center, group home, or foster placement, you may be able to hold the county, agency, or operator that was responsible for your safety accountable.
