In the days since the news broke that Los Angeles County had agreed to pay $4 billion to nearly 7,000 people who were victims of sexual abuse while locked in juvenile detention facilities or child welfare group homes, my phone has not stopped buzzing with texts from women I love – women I’ve survived with, built with and fought alongside for decades.
Like me, they are survivors of the intertwined child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Many of us are also survivors of state-sanctioned sexual abuse at the hands of those entrusted to care for us. Certainly, we want to see victims get long-overdue compensation. But we know that this settlement won’t do anything to stop the next generation of girls from going through the exact same things that we did.
Until the culture in Los Angeles County’s youth justice system changes, the violence and trauma will continue. More than 50 girls are still incarcerated at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles despite the fact that the county’s own risk assessment tool shows that 99 percent of those arrested for the first time could safely be released and the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in 2023 to work toward ending the incarceration of girls and gender expansive youth entirely. When the county re-opened Los Padrinos, after the Board of State and Community Corrections found its two other juvenile halls unfit for habitation in 2023, the probation department called the move a “bold new plan to reset probation’s juvenile hall operations” and “change from a detention approach to a therapeutic Behavior Health Model.” But in December 2024, the Board of State and Community Corrections determined that Los Padrinos also was unsafe for youth.
The county kept young people there anyway, including the girls. Then, on April 18 of this year, a Los Angeles County judge ruled that it was unlawful to keep youth at Los Padrinos and demanded that probation come up with yet another plan for moving them.
As of this writing, the girls are still there, despite determinations from a state body and a county court that they are not safe there. Moving them to yet another locked institution is not going to change this. If the $4 billion settlement — for abuses that stretch back decades at multiple institutions — tells us anything, it’s that children raised in institutions will always be vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.
I learned this at 16 when the court sent me to a group home in San Francisco. One of the staff was known for buying the male residents weed. When I asked him to buy me a pack of cigarettes, he said it would cost me. I said I didn’t have money but I’d ask my mom during her next visit. He told me not to worry — we’d figure it out.
Later that week, he followed me into the basement where I’d gone to do my laundry and told me I could “pay him back” on his next overnight shift. I was scared. My body felt weak. I called my probation officer. I called my attorney. I called and called and no one came. No one even called back.
So I ran.
Over the years I spent on the streets, the threat of sexual violence was always in the air. But at least it wasn’t coming from someone who was paid by the state to take care of me. Even as a teenager, I knew how wrong that was.
When I was arrested, I told a probation officer what had happened in that group home. He didn’t ask me any questions, he just told me not to worry, that particular staff member didn’t work there anymore. That was it. No follow-up. No accountability.
I never spoke of it again, but I learned something that day: no one was coming to save me. Not the courts. Not probation. Not the people paid to protect me. The system didn’t care if I lived, let alone if I was safe.
When I was 17, I was one of the first girls hired at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, then a tiny organization run by and for girls who no one else treated as fully human. Together, over three decades, we have built a network of organizations that see us, believe in us and push us to turn our pain into power. We’ve worked with over 38,000 system-impacted women, girls and gender-expansive people. All of us have survived physical and sexual violence — at the hands of partners, police, prison guards, doctors and the state.
Today, I’m a seasoned leader — a mother, a speaker and someone who has raised millions of dollars for this work. But my sisters — these women — are still my home. We are the ones we call in the middle of the night. We are the ones who hold each other’s silence and stories in ways that allow us to keep each other safe.
We’re also there for the 50-plus girls who are still held in a Los Angeles County juvenile hall that the Board of State and Community Corrections has deemed uninhabitable. When we ask why they are still there, we are told it is because these girls have nowhere else to go. There just aren’t alternatives available in the community.
We know this isn’t right because we at Reimagine Freedom have created such an alternative. The same women who were once in juvenile hall or on the street — the girls no one believed, much less believed in — have come together to create a statewide network of survivor-run organizations working together to reimagine freedom. We are the ones who keep each other safe, because no one else ever has.
In 2020, we launched Beloved Village, which works to create housing solutions that don’t feel like the systems that have harmed us. This doesn’t mean creating new institutions. It means addressing key structural drivers of girls’ incarceration: poverty and housing insecurity.
Beloved Village operates from the conviction that all youth deserve loving homes where they can thrive. Ideally that is with family. If that is not possible, it is with extended family, and if that is not possible, it is within their own communities. To make this happen, we are investing money and deep support directly into families. Our aim is to ensure that families, not institutions, have the resources they need to receive the girls who are sitting today in a condemned juvenile hall, vulnerable to sexual and other abuse, because they supposedly have “nowhere to go.”
We also have a solution for the very small percentage of girls who cannot go home or to extended family. In February, we received our license as a Foster Family Agency. This gives us the capacity to find and support caring homes in girls’ own communities.
But there is a catch. The lawsuits over decades of abuse inside L.A.’s juvenile halls and children’s “shelters” have become so expensive that getting insurance as a foster family agency is nearly impossible. A number of agencies have already shut down as a result. Locking a girl up in Los Angeles costs almost $800,000 a year, but we can’t get the girls out of there unless we can pay $300,000 a year in premiums.
What the $4 billion lawsuit revealed is human trafficking, facilitated by the very systems that claim to protect us. Payment for past harms is one thing, but what is being done to prevent the next generation from experiencing the same abuses? Where, finally, is the freedom for our girls?
Believe us. Fund us. Follow our lead.
As poet and activist June Jordan put it, we are the ones we have been waiting for. And we cannot wait anymore.
