How do we as a society make up for past wrongs? Last week, Los Angeles County reached a tentative agreement to pay $4 billion in order to settle more than 6,800 sexual abuse claims. Filed in the wake of a 2020 law, which allows victims of childhood abuse to sue their abusers even after the statute of limitations has expired, some of these claims go back as far as the 1950s. Most of the harm occurred at juvenile detention facilities and at the MacLaren Children’s Center.
According to The New York Times , MacLaren, which was open from 1961 to 2003 as a foster home, had a long history of abusing children. “MacLaren managers had allowed convicted burglars and drug traffickers to care for children and had not checked the criminal background of employees for decades. … (F)ormer residents said staff members had crawled into their bunks at night and sexually assaulted them, punishing them if they reported the abuses. Some said they had been as young as 5 at the time.”
There can be little doubt that the more than 1,200 plaintiffs in the suit suffered long-term consequences as a result of this deplorable treatment. The widespread nature of the abuse and the length of time that it went on also suggest a systemic problem —people at the highest levels who did not act when they should have…