What is happening to this Amish girl after she was raped by her brothers?

[EarthSight]

They've been given a 10 year suspended sentence, 100 hours of community service, and a $250. Disgusting.

Where is the girl now (who is pregnant with one of their children)? How does she feel that her brothers have been let go and not even jailed for what they did to her? Is she still living in the Amish community? My heart goes out to her.

metro.co.uk/2020/09/21/incest-amish-brothers-who-gang-raped-sister-12-spared-jail-over-fears-inmates-would-hurt-them-13305125/?ito=amp-trending-3

I think this demonstrates that not all cultures are equal, and whenever God is on the board of directors, all hell breaks lose.

I think the boiling frog analogy is a good one in that religious groups will always seek to take but never give. I personally do not care about people's private faith or none, but it has no place in evidence-based policy. This thread demonstrates how much of a cancer faith schools are and that religious institutes PAY THEIR TAXES - at least they can contribute to fixing some of the damage they cause.

That and we must all work together to diminsh rape myths and have compulsory sex education in schools.

(from Something Awful - if you want to make a pedo sad, have a child who knows the correct words for their private parts and knows the PANTS terms)

TBF it's the cultures that pay any genuine heed to sex offences that are out of step with the world.

In the UK we have had child sex abuse rings from various sections of society (celebrities etc) carry on while authorities turned a blind eye.

The problem in my experience is closed cultures with a conspiracy of silence/omerta vibe and a "bros before hos" attitude. It doesn't matter what the ideology is pinning the culture together, be it religious, nationalistic, ideological or even simply a shared workplace culture.

Off the top of my head, we've seen abuse scandals and systematic, institutionalised cover-ups in: religious organisations; the police (officers covering for domestic abusers within their ranks, institutionalising sexual assault in the form of encouraging undercover officers to form sexual relationships with their targets); the (predominantly white, rich) BBC; sporting bodies (both male on female, in the case of US gymnastics and Nasser or male on male in the case of Barry Bennell and the FA); isolated communities (the Pitcairn Island sexual abuse case); political organisations (the scandals in the SWP for instance or the recent "naughty Tory").

Sexual abuse flourishes when:

1. there's a culture which covers up for the perpetrators

2. perpetrators are seen as individual bad eggs rather than a sign of something systemically wrong (which feeds back into cover-up culture - an individual police officer says to himself "well of course, I think wife beating is terrible, I wouldn't beat my wife, but Bob is a good officer and his marriage is his own business" rather than "police officers have to uphold the law in all aspects of their lives and a problem with one of us is a problem with all of us")

3. there's a "teflon" culture - "but Jimmy does so much for charity, how dare you question his actions, think of all the money he raises for children", "you can't say that about this group, you're just a bigoted racist".

4. there's insitutionalised victim-blaming ("well a girl who ends up having sex with an older man is just a teenage trollop on the game", "we can forgive this rapist because the lord allows a man to repent of his sins, but you are a fallen woman forever".)

Sometimes more than one category is involved, and more than one cultural grouping. My sister was beaten by her ex-husband - her church closed ranks round him ("marriage is sacred") and the police didn't want to know (rural community where everyone knew everyone else and he played football with a couple of police officers).

It's not a race thing, a nationality thing, a religion thing. All of the above groupings (in all their incarnations - there are white grooming gangs as well as Asian grooming gangs, sexual abuse within the atheist community as well as churches) and more are susceptible.

It's omerta, "brotherhood", teflon-coating and insitutionalised victim-blaming that are the problems.

Predators are drawn to situations where they can get away with predating upon and exploiting others.
Power corrupts.

CareDuneRedux very very true. There is class prejudice as well, I think if you are professional, speak nicely, dress well people don't suspect and ignore some of the signals so they either get away with it for longer or get away with it.

It does happen in all communities, I'm old enough to remember when it was always assumed C of E vicars abused the choir boys, then it was Catholic priests, moving on it was various other groups with the most infamous in recent years being groups of Muslim men.

I don't think you can exonerate any group, if you assume automatically that people like "this" can't be abusers then you are dangerous as that is how they get away with it.

So many people think they would recognise a sex offender but they look just like everyone else, part of that is that they don't look nice in mug shots but no one does, even Hugh Grant looked shifty in his mug shot.

I think the only generalisation is that abusers are usually men but even that isn't 100%.

I'm reeling a bit at the moment as just found out a "nice" guy I worked with a few years ago has just gone to prison for abusing girls.

I've recently started what I hope can be a support thread for survivors of CSA from family members. The range of people who have abused and betrayed us is heartbreaking. I started it off the back of another thread about someone's brother's inappropriate boundaries; the amount of people commenting who experienced sibling CSA was an eye opener, and made me realise I was less alone.

As someone said on there, It's not ok. It's not normal. But it's not uncommon

I have my own experiences of growing up in an abusive wider family which fostered and enabled further abuse, and also adulthood experiences of abuse within specific self selecting and insular communities - I'm a bit busy right now but will try write something expanding on commonalities later.

@Plesky

There was a spate of mass rapes in a Bolivian Mennonite colony maybe ten years ago — the rapists drugged the women (who were aged from five to sixty five) with animal tranquilliser, and the women’s stories of waking up bloody and bruised were dismissed as imagination of haunting by the devil. From what I remember the elders of the community locked the perpetrators in a barn, finally, and were planning to imprison them themselves, until in the end they handed them over to the authorities.

www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/10/mennonites-rape-bolivia

If anyone’s interested, Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking is very good on the psychology of Mennonite women who had this done to them. (She’s a Canadian Mennonite.)

Thanks for the recommendation - I always want to understand more. I've added the book to my list. I feel the need to read The Second Sex again so I will read this after re-reading the aforementioned for the 10th time.

Thanks again Plesky

It's omerta, "brotherhood", teflon-coating and insitutionalised victim-blaming that are the problems.

^This

I don't condemn any group I condemn the practices of individual groups based on the above.

No group is perfect, no group is infallible.

It is widely known in the US that there are many groups that treat girls/women as subhuman from the very wealthy to the poorest of poor. Many are religious, some are isolated in Appalachia, some are cults, some are rich and affluent, and some are right next door. What is important are the victims not the groups they reside in/indoctrinated/trafficked into.

If we don't discuss the examples we are able to access how do we help those that are the most vulnerable? Dismissing real life examples only helps the perpetrators and further damages the groups/communities.

In regards to Native American people (I can't speak about indigenous peoples outside of the US as I don't have the knowledge) there is an epidemic of abuse, rape, murders, police brutality, and so much more that these communities suffer not from the inside but from the outside. FWIW the tribal laws are fairly strict and no nonsense but being mostly isolated/insulated from the US judicial system has pitfalls. There is rape and DV within these communities as well - they are not unique and no worse or no better than any other community in that respect. There is a failure in the tribal judicial system that mirrors the US judicial system - women/children are expected to feel safe and live on in communities where there abusers have been reintroduced post punishment or where the abusers never left and just got a slap on the wrist. These women and children are failed at every turn - they don't get what they need and have no recourse as they exist outside the US judicial framework (not that the US judicial system would provide any real help but not having access in most cases compounds the problem). But again, in most cases the perpetrators are non-native which further complicates prosecution as tribal law does not cover non-natives so it is few and far between that these non-native offenders see any retribution for their crimes.

Epstein, and the global group of pedophilic perverts that abused socio-economically challenged teenage girls is the most recent enormous scandal and it is mostly off people's radar without any answers or support for the victims. They (the victims) have been mostly forgotten.

You are wonderfully demonstrating here that you know nothing whatsoever about US First Peoples

And you are excusing the high rates of domestic and family violence within Native American communities. More than half of native women experience sexual violence and it won’t go away by blaming white people.

A lot of tribal authorities are simply not interested in dealing with sexual violence, and if you can’t get justice there, the US government certainly can’t get it for you unless the perp was non-Native. That’s the reality.

Being a fucking matriarchy does not protect you from family violence.

Also, your insistence on calling them First Peoples is puzzling, as this is not common terminology in the US.

These women and children are failed at every turn - they don't get what they need and have no recourse as they exist outside the US judicial framework

This is it. The Amish technically do fall within the US justice framework, but unless they do something that attracts the attention of the ‘English’ then it generally won’t get dealt with. Since the Amish value forgiveness over punishment, it’s so hard to break that conditioning to get justice, especially when you’d have to go to outside authorities

But isn't this an extreme reflection of society around the world.

That swimming guy ( forget his name) getting let off more or less for a clear case of rape.

The scandals with Jimmy saville etc over here, the grooming gangs in Rotherham etc having a blind eye turned.

John warboys victims were ignored time and time again. And they were going to release him.

And that's just here. Replicated all over the world to a greater or lesser extent.

While closed religious communities and cults are ripe for this, the attitudes etc are current and global.

We really need not to forget that.

It looks like the so called sentence is to be reviewed and they may serve some jail time. Local outcry was pretty bad. Good. What on earth were they thinking sending those creatures back to the home with that poor girl (and the other rapist brother)?

Great post by CaraDuneRedux.

The more that filthy abuse gets dragged into the light- no matter what group is trying to keep it in the dark- the better.

The news story I read said they had broken their bail conditions by contacting the girl (their sister). Can only imagine what that must have done to her.

What I want to know is what the parents of these boys are doing? How are they not also responsible.

Bet they still dont get jail time.