PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — More than two dozen men and women say they were physically, sexually and emotionally abused as children at New Hampshire’s state-run youth detention center over the course of three decades, according to attorneys who have filed a class action lawsuit on their behalf.

The lawsuit filed Saturday in Merrimack County Superior Court comes six months after two former counselors were charged with repeatedly raping a teenage boy at the Youth Development Center in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the late 1990s. The victim in that case is now the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by attorneys representing 35 others who say they were abused between 1982 and 2014.

“This lawsuit seeks to hold the state of New Hampshire and others responsible for the lives they forever destroyed and to bring about system change so that this can never happen again to another child in New Hampshire,” the lawsuit states.