Bordentown, N.J. juvenile detention centers named in sweeping child sexual abuse lawsuit
Three lawsuits say young people were assaulted at the Burlington County facilities, the Juvenile Medium Security Facility, and the Female Secure Care & Intake Facility.
A 17-year-old boy was forced to masturbate in front of a correctional officer.
A 14-year-old girl was ordered to strip and was fondled by a female guard.
And a 13-year-old boy was punched in the head for resisting a sexual assault by an officer whose job it was to keep him safe in detention.
Those are some of the disturbing allegations leveled against two Burlington County juvenile detention facilities in lawsuits filed last week against the state of New Jersey over longstanding complaints of sexual abuse in its youth justice system.
The filings add to the more than 300 complaints filed by formerly detained people in recent years accusing staff members at the state’s juvenile facilities of rape, coercive sexual contact, and inappropriate strip searches that took place between the 1980s and 2010s.
Allegations of such abuse have been growing in recent years. And since 2018, state officials have vowed to close the New Jersey Training School, a juvenile facility in Monroe Township that is the state’s largest. It remains open amid delays in construction on replacement facilities.
The latest legal action comes after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last year that the plaintiffs’ attorneys could combine scores of complaints into a multicounty filing, bringing together decades of allegations into an all-encompassing suit.
Most of the allegations are connected to the New Jersey Training School. But the new filings also detail sexual abuse allegations brought against staff at the Bordentown detention centers — the Juvenile Medium Security Facility and the Female Secure Care & Intake Facility — that had not previously been made public.
Sexual abuse occurred there as recently as 2017, according to the documents.
At the Juvenile Medium Security Facility, a detention center for boys, the suit says, a 17-year-old was abused by a male lieutenant guard on multiple occasions that year.
The victim, who is not named in the lawsuit, said the guard took him aside to conduct a strip search, then forced him to masturbate and threatened to have him charged with additional crimes if he refused. The teen said the abuse happened four more times, and that the guard bribed him with cigarettes, lighters, and food.
Another plaintiff said he was abused in the facility in 2001, when he was around 13-years-old, according to the filing. Two male guards sexually abused him on more than 10 occasions, the suit said, penetrating him and fondling him over and under his clothing. The assaults happened at the Bordentown facility and the New Jersey Training School, the document said.
And at the Bordentown detention center for girls, a plaintiff who was around 14 years old at the time alleged that in 2012 she was kissed and fondled by a female guard who asked her if she “liked girls,” the suit said. The girl told another staff member about the incident, but no action was taken, according to the document.
Michael Symons, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, which oversees the state’s juvenile justice system, said staff at the state’s juvenile detention facilities are subject to background checks that monitor for earlier abuse complaints. Staff are also required to complete training on preventing and reporting abuse, Symons said.
“Protecting youth in the care of the YJC is extremely important,” he said.
Clark Binkley, an attorney with the New York law firm Levy Konigsberg LLP, said many of his clients were coming forward years later, as adults, because they had only recently recognized their trauma, or did not think they would be believed at the time of the abuse.
Abusive staff members chose victims they could bribe with commissary items they could not have otherwise afforded, Binkley said, or because the young people were cut off from family while in detention and could not easily complain.
“It takes people a long time to process what they went through and feel ready to come forward,” he said.
Staff in the juvenile system have been criminally charged with abuse in isolated instances over the years. In 2024, two guards at Bordentown’s Female Secure Care and Intake Facility were charged with repeatedly sexually assaulting an 18-year-old girl who was held there. Both officers were terminated and await trial.
But the multicounty lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, offers a troubling picture of more systemic abuse, Binkley said.
The complaints are moving through the courts, and a limited number will go to trial, he said, in proceedings that could begin in 2028.
