At KidsPeace, No Peace for Kids: Abuse Allegations Mount at Pennsylvania Youth Psychiatric Center

Three former residents say they were assaulted as children and silenced by fear. Now, the psychiatric facility is using legal tactics to dodge accountability.

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“Giving hope, help and healing to children, adults and those who love them.” —KidsPeace website

He was told that what he remembered had never happened. The staff worker advised the 12-year-old boy to forget it—that “your brain can make up things.”

But he couldn’t forget it. He knew that he hadn’t made up the female staff member forcing foreign objects into his body at the KidsPeace residential treatment center in North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania. Nor could he dismiss as mere fantasy that she punished him three times by squeezing his genitals.

For nearly two decades, the incidents haunted him until, finally, as an adult, he and two other now-adult former residents filed suit against the facility, alleging they were sexually abused there between 2005 and 2011.

“This is a criminal industry getting away with egregious assault.”

The second plaintiff, then a 12- or 13-year-old girl at KidsPeace, alleges that a staff member fondled her genitals while she slept and later groped her in the shower, in a hallway and in a kitchenette. He threatened to hurt her if she told anyone.

The other alleges a security guard grabbed him from behind, kissed his neck, sucked on his ear and then fondled his genitals when he was about 14. At the time, he reported the incident, but nothing was done.

All three remembered their trauma and their attackers, down to the distinctive piercing of one abuser and the receding hairline and stocky frame of the security guard.

At the time, their voices were disregarded—the boys’ reports ignored, the girl silenced by fear.

They now seek unspecified damages over $50,000.

But citing its federal bankruptcy proceedings in 2013, KidsPeace is seeking to move the case to federal court—a tactic often used by corporations to secure a more favorable forum with broader legal options.

For KidsPeace, it seems, protecting the business model comes before protecting the child. A closer look at the psychiatric facility tasked with nurturing and healing vulnerable youth reveals a grim history of sexual abuse and violence. In 2019, the center dismissed an employee who later admitted to groping and kissing a 15-year-old patient. The employee, who worked there for three months as a mental health technician, pleaded guilty to institutional sexual assault.

It should surprise no one, therefore, that lax security is also a tradition at KidsPeace. In September 2021, a child walked right past an employee, exited the building, and didn’t turn up until the following morning, when she called the police and told them she wanted to go home. When questioned, the staff member said she didn’t stop the child because she was “by herself and the juvenile [was] bigger than her.” The troopers noted that the child was five foot five and 150 pounds.

It also should surprise no one that in 2021, over 100 emergency calls involving the psychiatric facility came through Lehigh County’s 911 Center. It likely would have been more, but there were issues with the phone line at KidsPeace for part of that year.

Over 100 emergency calls in 1 year involved KidsPeace.

In 2022, a 12-year-old girl ended up at Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest after an assault at the KidsPeace campus. State police said that KidsPeace hadn’t reported the violent incident—police only learned of the assault from the hospital. Local media put it plainly: “We can’t comprehend any situation where it would be appropriate for an organization to not immediately contact law enforcement after an assault on a child under its care.”

But there are many incomprehensible situations coming to light at KidsPeace. The latest, involving three people who found the courage as adults that had been beaten out of them as children, was neither the first nor will it be the last.

For KidsPeace is just one of the surging number of psychiatric hospitals where children are being raped, restrained to death, drugged into submission, and traumatized by abusive psychiatrists and staff. Driven by profit and nothing else, psychiatric hospitals from California to Vermont have been exposed as houses of horror for the innocent. Mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has long chronicled an industry with the blood of children on its hands. Fraud and abuse settlements in the millions and tens of millions of dollars have become the norm rather than the exception. As just the tip of the iceberg, in the past few years alone, two providers, Acadia Healthcare and Universal Health Services, have had at least $580 million in jury verdicts awarded against them over two children, aged 8 and 13, who were sexually abused in their facilities. And yet they continue to expand, adding more beds and more facilities.

As CCHR International President Jan Eastgate said, “This is a criminal industry getting away with egregious assault and deaths of youths, aided by government complacency and bureaucratic delay. America is oblivious to this massive child abuse. That must end now. No more delays. No more children sacrificed to a system built for profit, not protection.”

Some reports suggest that over 37 percent of child and youth psychiatric inpatients have been brutally restrained or put into isolation—often for non-threatening behavior. These are children thrust into, as the KidsPeace lawsuit describes it, “a culture of fear and unwarranted retribution.”

What if it were your child?

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