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The Gentle People
Courts have permitted the Amish to live outside the law. But in some places, Amish women are sexually assaulted with no recourse







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Mary gave the letter to a friend, who drove 30 minutes northwest of the house where Mary was staying in the Wisconsin town of Viroqua, past a couple of dirt roads, a string of red barns, and frozen cornfields. He waited until nearly midnight on a cold evening last February, and then put the letter in the mailbox at the white shingled home of Sam Mast, an Amish minister in the community where Mary's family lived during her teenage years.


Mary's father was killed in a buggy accident when she was 5; she remembers him pulling her onto his lap and fondling her at their home in the small town of Sugar Grove, Pa. After her father's death, Mary's family moved 100 miles south to New Wilmington, Pa., another small town, where the back roads are filled with brown buggies and white shingled homes. There, Mary's two older cousins and brothers began molesting her. Johnny told the police that his cousins encouraged him, "as far as breaking her in." (The cousins denied that, but admitted to molesting Mary.) By the time Mary was in her teens, she was being raped regularly by Johnny, who is seven years older, and her brother Eli, who is four years older. Once, Eli climbed on top of her while Johnny held her down.


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."


To the hordes of tourists who travel to Pennsylvania Dutch country each year to go to quilting bees and shop for crafts, the Gentle People, as the Amish are known, represent innocence. They are a people apart, removed in place and arrested in time. They reject the corruptions of modernity-the cars that have splintered American communities and the televisions that have riveted the country's youth. The Amish way of life is grounded in agriculture, hard work, and community. Its deliberate simplicity takes the form of horse-drawn buggies, clothes that could have come from a Vermeer painting, and a native German dialect infused with English words.


The myth of the Amish is amplified in movies like Witness and television shows like Amish in the City. It's also fed by a series of practices that reinforce the group's insularity. The Amish want to be left alone by the state-and to a remarkable extent, they are. They don't fight America's wars or, for the most part, contribute to Social Security. In 1972, noting their "excellent record as law-abiding and generally self-sufficient members of society," the Supreme Court allowed the Amish to take their children out of school after eighth grade.


The license the Amish have been granted rests on the trust that the community will police itself, with Amish bishops and ministers acting in lieu of law enforcement. Yet keeping order comes hard to church leaders. "The Amish see the force of law as contrary to the Christian spirit," said Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an expert on the group. As a result, the Amish shy away from sending people to prison and the system of punishment of "the English," as the Amish call other Americans. Once a sinner has confessed, and his repentance has been deemed genuine, every member of the Amish community must forgive him.


This approach is rooted in the Amish notion of Gelassenheit, or submission. Church members abide by their clergymen; children obey their parents; sisters mind their brothers; and wives defer to their husbands (divorce is taboo). With each act of submission, the Amish follow the lesson of Jesus when he died on the cross rather than resist his adversaries.


But can a community govern itself by Jesus's teaching of mercy alone? It is sinful for the Amish to withhold forgiveness-so sinful that anyone who refers to a past misdeed after the Amish penalty for it has ended can be punished in the same manner as the original sinner. "That's a big thing in the Amish community," Mary said. "You have to forgive and forgive."


In some church districts, which encompass only two or three dozen families scattered along back roads, there appear to be many crimes like Johnny and Eli's to forgive. 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." Some police forces and district attorneys do their best to step in, though they are rarely welcomed. Others are slow to investigate or quick to let off Amish offenders with light punishments. When that happens, girls like Mary are failed three times: by their families, their church, and their state.


Kathryn Byler, who counts Mary and her family as distant kin, lives more than 600 miles from them, in Morrow County, Ohio. The Amish don't own phones (some use them only for emergencies). Still, news gets around. Kathryn knew Mary's story.
Before her father's death, Mary told her mother, Sally, that he was molesting her. At first, Sally didn't believe her daughter. Mary said that her mother told her, "He says he's sorry and you have to forgive him." After her husband's death, Sally raised Mary and her eight sons on her own. Her household wasn't the tidiest, and the children didn't always listen to her. Sally got particularly frustrated with Mary, who had inherited her large almond-shaped eyes and tendency to talk out of turn.


When Mary's brothers began raping her, she turned to her mother again. Sally scolded the boys and gave them what Eli described as a light "mother's tap." She also gave them an herb that she hoped would reduce their sex drives. When the abuse resumed and Mary went back to her mother, she said Sally responded, "You don't fight hard enough and you don't pray hard enough."


"The boys were doing bad things and the mother knew," Kathryn said. "What mother would allow that to happen in her house?" And yet, it happened in her house as well.


When I knocked on her screen door on a recent autumn afternoon, Kathryn was boiling two large pots of water for her husband Raymond's bath. His white shirt hung near the wood-burning stove, along with his spare straw hat. Raymond was out doing carpentry work. Kathryn tied on a black bonnet as she came to answer the door.


I had already encountered Kathryn in court documents. This was the mother who had tried to shield her husband from prosecution, after the boyfriend of one of her three daughters reported to the Ohio police that Raymond was molesting two of the girls. The abuse began when the older girl was 5 or 6; it lasted more than a decade, and included repeated rapes. (The girl grew up in Pennsylvania near Mary Byler, and told Mary that her father was raping her.)


"I may have been to blame, too," Kathryn Byler said in court at her husband's sentencing in December 1998. In earlier interviews with detectives, Byler faulted herself for failing to sexually satisfy her husband. Like Sally, she talked about administering an herbal remedy to reduce his sex drive. "She knew what was going on. It was almost, 'Take my daughter by the hand and let's go to the barn,' " said Sergeant Paul Mills, who helped investigate the case. " 'So sayeth her husband,' and whatever he says is the way it has to be."


While we talked, Kathryn sat in a rocking chair, which she'd polished to a high shine. She wore metal-frame glasses and a dark green dress, pinned together because her church doesn't allow zippers. Beneath her black bonnet, her face was plain and open. As her religion dictates, she wore no makeup or jewelry. Though she was afraid to talk and spoke softly, fear didn't stop the words from rushing out of her. It felt good, she said as she settled into her chair.


Kathryn doesn't see her husband as a bad man. She smiled when she showed me a picture of a lighthouse that Raymond had painted, and she praised him for coming home early that day to help can tomatoes. Still, he has a nasty temper. Kathryn hates the foosball table that sits in the middle of her living room, an eyesore of miniature yellow and black men that was a gift from an English friend. But she has stopped asking Raymond to take it away. When he gets upset, he shouts, and then she cries. She has learned to be careful with him.


Years before his arrest, Raymond confessed to molesting one of his daughters and, as Kathryn put it, "made things right in church." Kathryn said that she believed he had stopped the abuse, though when her husband sent her out of the house on errands, a part of her wondered. "I knew he wanted me to go away a lot, but I trusted him," she said. "I guess I trusted him too far."


When their trust is betrayed, women like Kathryn and Sally see themselves as having little recourse. In 1996, Sally remarried a man named William Kempf, whom she'd met on a bus ride. The cabinetmaker, who is now 78, had a mean streak, and he took to hitting Sally, Mary, and Mary's younger half-sister. "Sally lived eight miles from the nearest police station," Sally's lawyer, Russell Hanson, said to explain why his client, who declined to be interviewed, didn't report her sons. "I was told by one of the elders that women are not permitted to take their horses to town."


Yet in a shed one door down from the Kempfs' house sits a white phone. It's registered in an English neighbor's name but is used by the Amish. Sally didn't call the police because she'd been taught to defer to the men in her household, even if they were her sons, and because she belongs to a community that believes the greater threat comes from without, not within.


Kathryn, for her part, has borne her husband six children. Four older sons and daughters have left home-the oldest girl got married and the middle girl lives with her-but their mother works hard to take care of Raymond and the young son and daughter who still live with them. Even if the church allowed divorce, Kathryn wouldn't want one. She'd like Raymond to take medication to help calm his temper. He won't, though, so she takes pills to ease her own sadness. "We're supposed to forgive, but that's hard to do," Kathryn said. "The only way I can ever truly forgive him is when he dies. Those were our children, and look what he did."
The Amish church traces its roots to the 16th century, when a group of Swiss dissidents decided the Protestant Reformation was moving too slowly. They embraced baptism of adults rather than children, a practice that was seen as a threat to the civic order and punished by execution. The Amish faced persecution and torture, which they relive in their prayers and hymns every other Sunday, when they worship in each other's homes.


Today, most of the church's 200,000 members live in the United States, and about half of them are in Pennsylvania and Ohio, concentrated in rural counties that are the heart of Amish country. There is a sameness to much of the region, with its white shingled homes, dark buggies, and repeating surnames.


As Donald Kraybill explains in his book The Amish and the State, there are two kingdoms in Amish theology: the kingdom of Christ, inhabited by the Amish, and the one in which everyone else lives. To maintain the boundary between the two worlds, the Amish hold themselves apart from the secular state as much as they can. In the mid-1900s, dozens of Amish fathers went to prison rather than agree to send their kids to public schools with non-Amish children. The community opened its own one-room schoolhouses, where the curricula ignored subjects like science and sex education. A woman who now lives near the Amish in Ohio's Guernsey County reports that many of her neighbors weren't taught that the earth was round. "A lot of Amish will tell you they don't want their kids to be educated," she said. "The more they know, the more apt they are to leave."


The Amish tightly circumscribe their world in other ways as well. For the most part, they don't file lawsuits, serve on juries, run for political office, or vote (despite Republican efforts to enlist them in the 2004 election). The bishop is the highest clergyman in the hierarchy of each church, and he oversees two ministers and a deacon. Men and women propose candidates for minister and deacon, and in most districts any man with two or three nominations is considered. The "elected" clergy is chosen according to a biblical method of casting lots: each man chooses from a pile of identical hymnals, and the one who chooses the book marked with a piece of paper bearing a verse from the Bible becomes a church leader.


The bishop, who is chosen the same way from a field of three ministers, has awesome authority. He interprets the Ordnung, the unwritten rules that govern each church district, stipulating everything from the size of a man's hat brim to the paint color on the outside of a house. When a church member violates the Ordnung, the bishop determines the punishment.


When she turned 17 three years ago, Mary Byler joined the church, as Amish adults must do. Johnny had stopped raping her when he got married in 1998. Mary thinks her new status as a church member protected her from Eli because it meant she had a duty to confess to fornication. She tried to forget what had happened with her brothers, but she couldn't. When she was 19, Mary sought succor from her minister, Sam Mast. As she stood awkwardly in his workshop, Mast said he saw that she was "heavy-hearted." But Mary couldn't bring herself to tell him what Johnny and Eli had done. Mast suggested that she confess her sins in church. "I said, 'Why don't you go to somebody and just empty it out?' " he told me recently.


To some degree, Johnny had confessed his own a few years earlier, when he was 21. But he admitted to fornication without saying that he had committed rape or that his victim had been his sister. The church elders didn't probe. Bishop Dan Miller listened to Johnny's confession, and later Mast gave him the letter Mary had written. But when I spoke with him, Miller said he had "no sense of what was going on." He didn't connect Johnny's confession with Mary's plea for help.


Johnny's punishment for his confessed sins lasted two weeks. During that period, he was shunned, the traditional Amish punishment for serious transgressions. As if sin were contagious, the community erects a metaphorical fence around the sinner. Johnny wasn't allowed to leave his home except to attend church. After his punishment, he returned to working in his harness shop. Mary's punishment, by contrast, lasts forever.


As for Mary's brothers, Miller declared that Johnny and Eli would be shunned for periods of four and six weeks. "They told us they wanted to quit and were sorry about what happened," the minister said.


In the shadow of a peeling white house in Guernsey Couny, Ohio, sits a rusty shed. Its wooden door had swung open on an afternoon in October, revealing black letters that spelled out the name N-O-R-M-A-N B-Y-L-E-R.
Now 72, Norman was diagnosed a few years ago with depression and the beginnings of dementia. A photograph of him at the time reveals thin features accented by a coarse white beard and dark, penetrating eyes. Norman has a history of pedophilia that dates to the 1970s, when he allegedly molested several of his eight daughters and at least one young woman outside his family. During that period, he confessed in church, repented, and was banished for four weeks.


Aware of her father's problem, Norman's youngest daughter "went to great lengths to make sure he wasn't alone" with kids, said his public defender, Diane Menashe. In 1995, the daughter and her husband, Tobie Yoder, let Norman move onto their property. Four years later, the Yoders discovered that Norman was molesting three of his granddaughters, ages 3, 5, and 8.


Tobie went to Bishop Moses Miller and the elders in his Swartzentruber district. That denomination falls on the most restrictive end of the spectrum from Old Order to New Order Amish. (The New Order allows brighter colored clothing and more modern appliances.) Bishops like Miller actively police their congregations. The sins multiply quickly. Driving a car, using a tractor, masturbating, and drinking alcohol can all trigger the maximum six-week ban. (At the same time, some Swartzentrubers make allowances, like permitting tobacco and "bed courtship": On Saturday nights in Moses Miller's district, teenage boys are allowed to steal into the rooms of girls their age. The teens are supposed to keep their clothes on, but the boy isn't expected to leave until milking time the next morning. Many parents encourage bed courtship because it often leads to early marriages, which make young people less likely to leave the church.)


Moses Miller responded to Tobie Yoder's appeal by scolding Norman, who told him that in molesting his granddaughters, he was acting "no different than the cows in the field." Norman was shunned for six weeks. But he remained out of control, so volatile that adults in the area feared for their safety. Eventually Bishop Miller took the unusual step of allowing Yoder to take his father-in-law to a hospital.


Despite Norman's recurring problems, other bishops say they would not have made the decision that Miller
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