![]() ![]() “It’s much slower and less highly visible,” says Linda Crockett, founder and director of Safe Communities, an organization that works to prevent child sexual abuse. There are so many people who go to church and just endure.”Īnd yet, as #MeToo has rocked mainstream culture, Amish women have instigated their own female-driven movement. “We’re told that it’s not Christlike to report,” explains Esther*, an Amish woman who says she was abused by her brother and a neighbor boy at age 9. Their stories describe a widespread, decentralized cover-up of child sexual abuse by Amish clergy. Some victims said they were intimidated and threatened with excommunication. Virtually every Amish victim I spoke to-mostly women but also several men-told me they were dissuaded by their family or church leaders from reporting their abuse to police or had been conditioned not to seek outside help (as Sadie put it, she knew she’d just be “mocked or blamed”). MOVIE RICH PEOPLE HIIDE IN AMISH COUNTRY FULLChillingly, this number doesn’t begin to capture the full picture. In my reporting, I identified 52 official cases of Amish child sexual assault in seven states over the past two decades. But the stories I heard were not confined to any one place. Lacking one centralized leader, they live in local congregations or “church districts,” each made up of 20 to 40 families. Because of their high birth rate-and because few members ever leave-they’re one of the fastest-growing religious groups in America. The Amish, who number roughly 342,000 in North America, are dispersed across rural areas of states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, a leading authority on Amish life. Victims told me stories of inappropriate touching, groping, fondling, exposure to genitals, digital penetration, coerced oral sex, anal sex, and rape, all at the hands of their own family members, neighbors, and church leaders. ![]() ![]() I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret spanning generations. Over the past year, I’ve interviewed nearly three dozen Amish people, in addition to law enforcement, judges, attorneys, outreach workers, and scholars. It wasn’t until now that Sadie decided to speak up, to reveal the darkness beneath the bucolic surface of her childhood. A friend helped her realize years later: While being raped, she had probably suffered a miscarriage. This page also includes resources for survivors of sexual abuse in Amish and Mennonite communities.Īnd even on the day when, at 14, she says she was cornered in the pantry by one of her brothers and raped on the sink, and then felt a gush and saw blood running down her leg, and cleaned up alone while he walked away, and gingerly placed her underwear in a bucket of cold water before going back to her chores. Listen to The Backstory, where she describes the process. Reporting on sexual abuse is always difficult, but Sarah encountered unique challenges in this story. ![]()
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