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. “We didn’t feel that we had anywhere to go to say anything.”Įven on the day the police showed up on her doorstep to question then-12-year-old Sadie’s father about his alleged abuse of his daughters.Įven on the day when, almost two years later, Abner was sentenced by a circuit court judge to just five years’ probation.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. “There was no love or support,” she says. Sadie’s small world was built around adherence to rules-and keeping quiet was one of them. The sisters who shared Sadie’s room (and even her bed) never woke up-or if they did, never said anything, although some later confided that they were being raped too. She would roll over afterward, ashamed and confused. By 14, she says, three more brothers had raped her and she was being attacked in the hayloft or in her own bed multiple times a week. By 12, she’d been abused by her father, Abner*, a chiropractor who penetrated her with his fingers on the same table where he saw patients, telling her he was “flipping her uterus” to ensure her fertility. Instead, she attended a one-room Amish schoolhouse and rode a horse and buggy to church-a life designed to be humble and disciplined and godly.īy age 9, she says, she’d been raped by one of her older brothers. They usually got what they wanted.Īs a child, Sadie* was carefully shielded from outside influences, never allowed to watch TV or listen to pop music or get her learner’s permit. ![]() Sometimes she’d pry herself free and sprint toward the house, but “they were bigger and stronger,” she says. Her ripped dresses, the clothespins that bent apart on her apron as another brother grabbed her at dusk by the hogpen after they finished feeding the pigs. Her underwear shoved to the side as his body hovered over hers, one of his feet still on the floor. ![]() The bed creaking late at night after one of her brothers snuck into her room and pulled her to the edge of her mattress.
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