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.
“On behalf of the county, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” Los Angeles County Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport said at a news conference. “The historic scope of this settlement makes clear that we are committed to helping the survivors recover and rebuild their lives — and to making and enforcing the systemic changes needed to keep young people safe.”
Leaving aside the cost of the settlement, which officials warn may send the county into bankruptcy, it will also require that services be cut. If all policy decisions require tradeoffs, it is worth understanding what it will cost people in need currently to compensate those who have been harmed in the past. Other organizations, from the Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church, have already had to grapple with this question.
The effects of this settlement will worsen what has already become a crisis in California and around the country — the inability of foster care agencies to get insurance. Just last year, the Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California, which insures 90% of foster family agencies in California, stopped renewing insurance policies for foster family agencies and will not issue new policies. A spokesperson explained: “We continued over the course of probably two years to adjust policy limits, adjust terms, increase premiums.” But the situation “became unsustainable.”
As a group of colleagues and I pointed out in a paper from the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year, the situation is growing dire. “In Pennsylvania, more than half of foster care providers report a lack of available and affordable liability insurance. In New York, they have found it ‘extremely hard’ to find insurance. … In Florida, liability insurance issues became an ‘existential threat.’ The challenge across these state systems is not limited to the rare low-quality service provider. It is affecting every provider, even those with high standards and spotless records.”
Maryland also just extended its statute of limitations, and the flurry of lawsuits there in recent months will no doubt have a similar impact.
What will happen? As we wrote for AEI, “The result for the foster care system will be the closure of service providers like foster family agencies. … When these entities are forced to close and their resources are taken away, it ripples through the system. When insurance is unavailable or too costly, managing risk becomes challenging, leading states to place children in environments that implement increased supervision.”
In other words, current foster kids will pay for the wrongs that were perpetrated against foster kids 70 years ago.
For decades, the question of reparations has vexed our country. The easiest response to the concept of reparations for slavery is that no one who was a slave or a slave owner is alive today, and why should their descendants — let alone the descendants of people who weren’t even in this country then — pay or be paid for this wrong?
But what amount of money does justice demand? These eye-popping awards may seem justified when considering the harm that is done to people, and maybe they will send a message to organizations that we are serious about the problem of sexual abuse. But could that have been accomplished with a $1 billion or a $500 million settlement? The truth is that no amount of money will fix the psychological harm done by child sexual abuse. And maybe no amount of money will prevent it from happening again.
In the meantime, though, children who have been abused and need a safe and loving home will have a harder time finding one.