The students returning to school after sexual assault: ‘You go back the next day, and you just deal with it’
Peer-on-peer violence is on the rise. But when schools must balance a duty of care to both victims and perpetrators, where does this leave girls who have to pursue their education in the shadow of sexual assault?
In the wake of the latest headlines about alleged sexual assaults involving school boys and the death of a 16-year-old girl from suspected sexual choking, national cabinet has agreed to prioritise its plan to end sexual violence against women, the NSW government has flagged a new set of priorities with education ministers and the federal government has announced draft legislation for a digital duty of care. Meanwhile, the victim at the centre of an alleged gang-rape involving two students from a Sydney private school and another boy has prepared to sit her HSC exams.
“I can’t imagine what she is going through,” police prosecutor Sergeant Rhonda Riley told the court last month. “But she will need to complete her HSC going through pain and fear – not only mentally – for some time going forward.”
As peer-on-peer violence continues to rise, many girls, who make up the majority of school-age sexual assault victims, have no choice but to return to school to continue their education in the shadow of their assault. And in many cases, they must continue to share a campus with their assailant.
“In previous generations, it was more common for child sexual abuse to be inflicted by an adult than an adolescent,” reports the 2023 Australian Child Maltreatment Study. “In contemporary Australia, it is more common for child sexual abuse to be inflicted by an adolescent than an adult.”
These findings are echoed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and frontline services are buckling under the weight of a spike in peer-on-peer violence. While experts agree that this mounting crisis can’t be tackled by education institutions alone, schools make up a vital component of the conversation.
In 2024, the federal government began the welcome rollout of $77.6m in funding for the delivery of age-appropriate consent and respectful relationships education programs in schools across the country. But a growing cohort of advocates and experts are warning that as students become more informed as a result of education around consent, many of those same institutions are ill-equipped to deal with the fallout.
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Facing an abuser on school grounds
'Been through hell’: Boys who allege state employees sexually abused them in Kearney have uncertain support
Editor’s note: This story discusses suicidal ideation, mental health challenges and detailed allegations of sexual abuse of children. If you suspect that a child has been abused, call 800-652-1999 or report online.
It started with candy.
Ja’Zavier Martin, then 15 years old, said he found the gummy candy in his locker at the state-run youth treatment center in Kearney. He said Martha Ruiz Palacios, a 27-year-old frontline employee, put it there.
She had been asking Martin to play games away from the other boys in his cottage. She set the stakes: If you win Jenga, I’ll bring you something — the gummies, powder to flavor drinks.
“She’d let me win on purpose,” Martin said, sitting beside his mom in a recent interview. When he ate the candy from his locker, he felt strange. His vision blurred, he said. He felt tired. High.
Learning this, his mom shook her head: “She brought you edibles, boy?”
Add it to the growing list of offenses — the black eyes, the wound on his knee — that Jennifer Martin has tallied since her son went to Kearney in early 2024.
On that list, Ruiz Palacios represents the ultimate betrayal. She was also touching Martin. On his leg, his groin. The abuse lasted about two months, he said. It stopped only when someone caught them kissing on surveillance footage.
“It makes you think, like, how could I stop it faster?” said Martin, now 17. “How could you have told somebody faster? Like, why didn’t they see what was going on? Because, me … I didn’t understand what she was doing was wrong until it was too late.”
The Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney is one of Nebraska judges’ last resorts for teen boys in the juvenile justice system. It’s often used when other options for their rehabilitation — group homes, Boys Town — have been exhausted.
That last resort has become the site of dozens of allegations that range from grooming to sexual assault. Thirty-seven boys made 44 allegations against 19 staff members in a year, according to a state child welfare watchdog.
Four ex-employees have been arrested. Ruiz Palacios was the first. Her lawyer declined to comment for this story. She now sits in jail, serving a two-year sentence for third-degree sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The charges reference Martin, by initials and birth month.
State leaders have ousted the center’s administrator and her boss who oversaw all three youth centers for the Department of Health and Human Services. The state has restructured the center’s administration and made operational changes even as DHHS has denied that the YRTC had a deep-seated cultural problem.
DHHS did not respond to the specific allegations about youth in its care, though department spokesperson Jeff Powell said it “disputes some details of the allegations” in this story.
Meanwhile, boys at the center of this scandal are now grappling with the fallout from the abuse they allegedly experienced, two of them told the Flatwater Free Press in extended interviews.
They are inside systems, and a larger society, that aren’t primed to treat teen boys — especially those with criminal records — as victims. And there’s not a clear path for the state, which employed their alleged abusers, to directly address the harm its employees caused.
“The system isn’t set up to handle this,” said Lawrence Gendler, former Sarpy County juvenile court judge.
DaVontae Helmstadter was 16 years old in 2023, living in a different cottage, with a different staff, months before Martin got to YRTC. But the pattern is familiar: Snacks, games, conversations, alleged abuse.
He remembers asking Jessica Camacho, then 34, what she would do if he told people about their relationship. And he remembers what she said in return: “I’ll make sure you stay here.”
He remembers that the state employee who led his unit must have realized the relationship was out of line. She raised it with him more than once, he said, and told him he could tell her if he “had a crush” on Camacho. Nothing changed, he said.
He remembers a meeting with Cindy Krolikowski, who then ran Kearney’s YRTC, where he says he told her he thought his relationship with Camacho was inappropriate.
“She’s out of your league,” he recalls Krolikowski saying. Camacho wouldn’t do that. The former administrator didn’t respond to attempts to contact her for this story.
Helmstadter tried to ignore Camacho, he said, but she started writing him up for misbehavior, prolonging his time at the center. After he began spending time with her again, the abuse turned physical in areas out of surveillance cameras’ view, he said.
She would hold his hand, ask him to hug her or grab her butt, he said. In the most extreme case, he said, they had oral sex.
He told another adult after the abuse turned physical, he said — a male state employee, who Helmstadter recalls laughing it off.
Helmstadter was released from the YRTC in 2024 but ended up back in the system on new allegations. He went to a Lincoln center for several months, then back to Kearney. By then, he said, Camacho had developed a similar relationship with a boy from Douglas County.
In March 2025, Camacho was suspended for sharing a drink with a boy and inappropriate boundaries, according to a watchdog’s investigative report. The Inspector General of Nebraska Child Welfare didn’t name staff or children in the report, but this and other details align with interviews and court testimony referencing Camacho.
Before she left on suspension, Helmstadter said, Camacho told him and the Douglas County boy where they could find a cellphone: In a mop bucket, in an area where they often cleaned.
She asked them to send photos, videos. She FaceTimed the phone 12 times in three days, according to the IG report’s findings. The two boys would go to adjacent bathroom stalls and pass the black iPhone back and forth, Helmstadter remembers. She would masturbate and ask them to masturbate for her, he said.
Camacho resigned after staff found the phone. It had “sexually explicit content” from two adult women, including one who didn’t work at YRTC-Kearney, according to the IG report. It had videos of Camacho masturbating and inappropriate messages between her and the Douglas County boy.
There were escape plans on the phone, too. A lawyer for the Douglas County boy’s family previously said his client was placed in the center’s version of solitary confinement after the phone was discovered. Helmstadter said the same thing happened to him.
It felt like he was punished for something Camacho had done, he said: “It felt like torture.” (While DHHS leaders said they could not speak to specific cases, spokesperson Powell said confinement is “not allowed to be used as a punishment.”)
In Ruiz Palacios’ case, state employees appear to have notified the Nebraska State Patrol, child abuse hotline, Martin’s mom, his probation officer and attorney following video review. But Helmstadter’s case went differently: Employees in the compliance department, which looks into allegations like this, reported the phone to “numerous parties,” including the hotline and State Patrol, according to the IG report. But they didn’t mention the phone’s sexual content to the inspector general, judges, the boys’ lawyers or the boys’ parents.
While in confinement, a staff member Helmstadter identified as Katrina Fewkes had inappropriate conversations with him, he said, including telling him what color underwear she was wearing. He also recalls Fewkes telling him that higher-ups were sharing and looking at the photos of him from the phone. It made him cry.
“It just made me feel less of a man,” he said.
Fewkes, 45, was arrested in March. The charge, second-degree sexual abuse of a protected person, does not reference Helmstadter. Her lawyer on that case said he had not heard these specific allegations. She has pleaded not guilty and previously told Flatwater that she reported misconduct at the YRTC multiple times while working there.
Helmstadter said Camacho was contacting him as recently as last fall when he was at a halfway house in Omaha. Around that same time, a judge and lawyers in the Douglas County boy’s case questioned Krolikowski and other state witnesses at court hearings about Camacho’s behavior.
Camacho was arrested in June and faces six felony charges, including first-degree sexual abuse of a protected person. One of the charges, alleging intentional child abuse, references Helmstadter by initials and birth month. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney declined to comment for this story.
Helmstadter has since aged out of the juvenile justice system. He talked to a reporter this summer from behind glass at the Saunders County Jail, where he was held on adult charges.
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‘The perfect conditions for abuse’
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Iowa GOP focuses on trans athletes, quiet on abuse of kids | Opinion
Like all rational parents, I want to keep my four kids safe. But I also know that the threat posed to my kids from their transgender classmates or teammates is, statistically, zero.
Meanwhile, the threat posed by male authority figures in sports, activities, or private institutions is so much larger, I can document hundreds of recent cases in just the next few lines.
Our Republican leaders are spending millions of advertising dollars warning of the “threat” from transgender athletes. They want to “keep kids safe.” But they have spent their last decade in power failing to hold sexual abuse in athletic nonprofits to account, and they even passed a law allowing private schools to use my tax money to pay sexual abuse legal bills or hush money.
In 2018, Cedar Rapids AAU basketball coach Greg Stephen was convicted of sexually exploiting over 400 young, male basketball players.
Though he was sentenced to 180 years in prison, families have been unable to seek much financial restitution from the AAU because, as ProPublica reported, “arbitration clauses prevented his former players from suing the AAU … even though … the AAU failed to enforce its 2012 safety policies.”
The victims’ attorney, Guy Cook, says that the AAU uses a “sophisticated” way of suppressing child sex abuse lawsuits that is “not unlike what the Catholic Church has done.”
The AAU is a taxpayer-supported “nonprofit.” When Attorney General Brenna Bird came into office, did she launch an investigation into the AAU’s “sophisticated” way to skirt sexual abuse justice?
Of course not.
Instead, she spent our tax money joining a lawsuit with 19 other Republican AGs aimed at blocking a Minnesota high school league policy allowing transgender athletes to play in girls’ sports.
If you are keeping score at home, the total number of our kids sexually abused by trans athletes in Minnesota is zero. The total number of athletes abused by one Cedar Raids AAU coach is over 400.
In 2018, Curtis Van Dam, a fifth-grade teacher at Sioux Center Christian School, was convicted of sexual contact with an 11-year-old boy, with initial filings containing 146 counts of sexual misconduct.
Similarly, in 2017, Benjamin Trane, owner of the Midwest Academy boarding school in eastern Iowa, was convicted of sexual abuse, exploitation, and child endangerment. Prosecutors said he would force female students into sexual acts in order to, sometimes, just be able to contact their out-of-state parents.
Did Gov. Kim Reynolds tighten restrictions on private schools to keep our kids safe from the sexual predators working there?
Of course not!
Instead, she signed House File 2416, banning transgender girls from participating in youth sports, though there are no documented cases of transgender athletes abusing their peers.
What’s worse, Reynolds made it legally easier for private schools to keep future sexual assault cases quiet with her Education Savings Account program. This law is so loose, it allows my tax dollars to flow into a private school’s general fund, which can then be used for legal bills or sexual abuse hush money.
Reynolds cares so little for actual victims of sexual abuse, I couldn’t find any public statements about Greg Stephen, Curtis Van Dam, or Benjamin Trane.
I’m all for kids’ safety. But I am under no illusion that Republican rules have made our kids safer by any metric. No amount of transgender fearmongering will change that. Iowa needs real accountability that will only come with new leadership.
Mike Draper is founder and owner of RAYGUN.
Mike Draper's point here is well taken, although I agree with every step the GOP has taken in protecting female athletes and students from transgenders. While there may not be any documented cases of trans kids sexually assaulting girls in Iowa, there certainly are in other states and it's just a matter of time in Iowa.
That trans kids are responsible for too many school shootings in North America is also a huge concern.
But the point of child sex abuse by adults in school and sports settings is profound, at the very least. Far too little is being done to protect kids from predators who prefer their victims to be children. This is especially true in left-leaning states and countries where prison sentences often result in the predator being released while their child victims are still children. This should never be allowed to happen.
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