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Mommysavers Goddess
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Wisconsin
Real Name: Tanya
Posts: 3,635
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That didn't work, i will try to cut and paste the article.
Cases show Amish have failed
to deal effectively with abuse
By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review
The story of a young Wisconsin Amish woman — molested or raped more than 200 times in 10 years by male relatives — has caused many in and around the Amish community to examine how their insular society has failed to deal adequately with cases of sexual abuse.
The story of 21-year-old Mary Byler is summarized, along with other recent cases of sexual abuse among the Amish, in the latest issue of the law journal Legal Affairs.
The magazine’s January-February cover story, “The Gentle People,” by Legal Affairs senior editor Nadya Labi, recounts Byler’s struggle to alert Amish leaders and police to the ongoing sexual abuse in her family.
Byler’s case, as well as other similar cases, led to widespread media coverage in the past year as several Amish men were tried on sexual abuse charges.
At issue was not only the abuse but the steps taken by Amish church leaders to handle the crimes as spiritual transgressions, relying on a few weeks of church discipline to do the work of the law.
The result, in Byler’s case and others, was a cycle of abuse, followed by church shunning of the supposedly repentant attackers, followed by more abuse.
“There do seem to be systems within the Amish church that allow this type of thing to worsen,” Labi said Feb. 11. Labi interviewed Byler and several members of the Byler family for her story.
While Amish leaders are aware of the tendency in some communities to hide sexual abuse under the stiff rug of the Amish ordnung, or church regulations, some are trying to do something about it.
“It’s a horrendous sin that has existed since man began,” a Canadian Amishman, a historian, said Feb. 11, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It definitely needs to be dealt with.”
In most sexual abuse cases, he said, Amish ministers and bishops “don’t know how to deal with it . . . or how to realize the depth of the hurt of the person involved.”
In Byler’s community, near LaCrosse, Wis., her pleas for help were often met with silence.
According to Legal Affairs and other news reports, Byler was first abused by her father, Abraham Byler, when she was 4 years old in Pennsylvania.
After her father was killed in a buggy accident, the family moved elsewhere in Pennsylvania, where the frequent, shockingly violent abuse by Byler’s older brothers and some cousins began and continued for several years.
In 1996, Byler’s mother, Sally, now 49, married William Kempf, and the family moved to Cashton and then Viroqua, Wis. Kempf, now 78, inappropriately touched Byler and has been accused of physically abusing others in the family.
Byler said the constant sexual attacks finally stopped when she was 17 and joined the Amish church, and one of her tormentors got married.
Byler later began attending counseling sessions. But after Kempf and her mother told her to stop, Byler left home in February 2004. It was then she began to fear for the safety of her younger sister, who was still at home, and decided enough was enough.
After approaching local Amish church leaders, who took no action, Byler went to the police, who did.
After excommunicating Byler when the charges became public last March, local Amish leaders said they had done all they could to address her allegations, according to one newspaper.
“It wasn’t ignored,” Bishop Dan Miller told the LaCrosse (Wis.) Tribune in March 2004. “By our church, it was cleared up years ago. . . . We try to work out our problems ourselves, among the church. It’s our group, and it’s not our way and it wasn’t our forefathers’ way to take our problems to the law or to your people to settle it. It’s always worked better for us, we felt, to keep those standards and solve our problems if we can.”
Though Byler’s attackers eventually were convicted in court, their widely varying sentences continue to invite questions.
Following a criminal hearing in Vernon County, Wis., Kempf was sentenced in July to 18 months of probation on three counts of sexual assault and one count of battery.
“If it happened many times, it’s not rape anymore,” Kempf told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “She’s probably asking for it.”
Before his sentencing — attended like those of others in the case by crowds of Amish onlookers pledging support to the defendants but not the victim — Kempf told the Star Tribune: “Mary’s been brainwashed.”
Sally Kempf was given probation for failure to report a crime, a misdemeanor.
Byler’s older brother, Eli, 24, though accused of numerous attacks on his sister, admitted to one count of sexual assault on a child and was sentenced in August to eight years in jail, with four years’ probation.
Meanwhile, brother Johnny E. Byler, 25, though originally accused of five counts of sexual assault, pleaded guilty to two and was sentenced in October to a year in the county jail, to be served mostly at night so he could tend his farm.
Younger brother David Byler, 18, was sentenced in August to four years in jail for assaulting Mary Byler’s younger sister when she was 6.
Though Byler’s case is featured prominently in Legal Affairs, other similar cases also are detailed.
While the Amish leaders in Byler’s case resisted legal intervention, others have taken more proactive steps to alert their communities to sexual abuse and its pervasive dangers.
In December 1999, the Amish magazine Family Life published an article written by an anonymous plain Mennonite, “Journey to Freedom,” about sexual abuse among the conservative and Old Order groups.
In May 2002, an Amish author wrote “One Foot Against the Doorframe” in Family Life, also about sexual abuse.
This article was published to introduce the magazine’s 29,000 readers to a booklet on abuse from Amish-run Pathway Publishers in Aylmer, Ont. Since then, Pathway has distributed, free of charge, more than 8,000 copies of Strong Families, Safe Children: An Amish Family Resource.
The 63-page booklet originally was published by Ohio social service agencies in Wayne and Holmes counties, who then asked Pathway to reprint it.
“All segments of the plain society have asked for those booklets,” said the Amish historian. “And the mail ran 7 to 1 in favor of the [Family Life] articles.”
Labi said response to the Legal Affairs article has been mostly supportive of the young women she wrote about. Others contacted her to share similar experiences.
One Amish man even called to voice support. “He felt that I had tapped into something,” Labi said.
Though Byler and the other women in the story clearly are victims of brutal abuse, their attackers also may be victims, or at least products, of the darker attributes of their closed society.
Labi said when she interviewed members of Byler’s family, she was surprised by some of what they said, as well as by their willingness to speak openly about the case.
“I found them to be not necessarily the ogres you might expect,” Labi said. “But one of the things that struck me was a comment that they made — that their behavior was learned behavior.”
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Amish question - not meaning to offend
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