“Mary fingered her long brown hair as she thought of her sister. And she thought about her older brother, Johnny, and his refusal when she’d asked him to go to therapy the day before. She started writing. ‘When I was 4 years old, I was molested, when I was 6, I was sexually abused (rape) from then on till I was 17,’ the 19-year-old put down. ‘There was nothing I could do about this abuse as it was incest…’ There was no escape. Mary was grabbed in the bedroom, in the barn, in the outhouse, milking the cows in the morning, and on her way to school. ‘It did not matter how hard I tried to hide,’ Mary would explain in her letter to Mast, which she also sent to other Amish clergy. ‘If I ran upstairs to go to bed or to hide because I was at home with the boys, I’d be locking my door and turn around and there was someone crawling through my window. So my windows were always locked… Then they started taking off my door…’ No statistics are available, but according to one Amish counselor who works with troubled church members across the Midwest, sexual abuse of children is ‘almost a plague in some communities.’” —Legal Affairs (US)

(Thanks to hludens for the link.)

First, this is an incredible article detailing rampant incest, pedophilia, rape, and abuse among the “gentle people” of Amish communities. Next time you’re tempted to buy a quilt or a cherry pie from those quaint folks, give a thought to the sexually abused girl who had all her teeth pulled out because she “talked too much.”

Second, it goes without saying that you could uncover a seamy side to any community in the world. To some extent, this article makes for lurid reading precisely because the Amish are supposed to be such goody-two-shoes. As an outsider, you’re simultaneously shocked but titillated by the abuse, since there is some primal pleasure to be had in knowing that the holier-than-thou are actually as perverted as anybody else. Perhaps they’re even hornier-than-thou too (as a girl who once worked as an “masseuse” near Amish country affirmed to PervScan).

That being said, you have to wonder whether such narrow, willfully closed-off communities don’t create an environment that encourages sexual abuse. The Amish prefer to police themselves and, for the most part, regular legal authorities allow them to do so. However, this means that an Amish man who confesses to molesting his daughter just gets “shunned” for a few weeks. Meanwhile, even when regular authories do hear of a case, they find it almost impossible to prosecute because the Amish would rather shield one of their own — no matter how fucked up he is — than cooperate with “the English,” as they refer to outsiders.

In addition, a closed community not only shields the abusers, it also gives them the motivation to commit abuse. Think about it. People are biologically wired for promiscuity. Confine them to a narrow space with a narrow range of choices — what do you expect to happen? If you enclose a bunch of rats in a cage, they’ll fight and fuck and kill each other. And so too could you predict a sort of Rat Axiom of Human Sexual Behavior: when people are confined to a closed space, the laws and taboos governing their sexual behavior will break down. “Straight” males go gay in prison and Amish families implode in incest. Their way of living almost demands it. One Amish boy interviewed for the story thought it was “normal” to have sex with his sister. And in a weird sense, perhaps it was normal because there was no other outlet for his sexual urges.

To say this is not to excuse the behavior but rather to indict the community. For if the behavior emerges from the structure of the community, then the only way to change it is to change the community. To that end, the article discusses one radical precinct of Amish that encourages “bed courtships,” Saturday nights when a boy is allowed to stay in a girl’s bedroom until milking time the next morning. While they’re supposed to keep their clothes on, certainly this must go a long way toward relieving certain unbearable urges — and thus toward preventing incest.

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