The Gentle People
Impressed by their piety, courts have permitted the Amish to
live outside the law. But in some places, the group's ethic of
forgive and forget has produced a plague of incest - and let
many perpetrators go unpunished.
By Nadya Labi
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-
2005/feature_labi_janfeb05.html

When she wrote the letter that she hoped would protect her sister,
Mary Byler was lying on a twin bed, surrounded by rainbow-
colored walls and a sky-blue ceiling decorated with bright white
clouds. A stereo sat on the floor beside her. There were no signs
of the Amish upbringing she had left behind”no plain wood
furniture or chamber pot. Nothing except a stuffed doll that had
belonged to her 6-year-old sister. The little girl had put the doll's
bonnet on backward.

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."

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). In 1993, Martin France, the district attorney
in Wayne County, Ohio, prosecuted a case against a driver who
killed five Amish children. France got little support from the
victims' families. "They didn't want anything to do with me. They
would just say, 'This was God's will and we're not going to
interfere,' " he recalled. An Amish woman who lived next to the
site of the accident told France that while she was pinning up her
laundry, she saw the driver's car race down a hill and hit the
children, who flew as high as a nearby telephone pole. But the
woman refused to testify; her bishop wouldn't allow it.

That bishop was a man in his late 20s who worked in his family's
chair factory. Amish church leaders are chosen by lot”or, as the
faithful believe, by the unseen hand of God. 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.

When she wrote to Mast, Mary hoped that he and Miller would
protect her younger sister, who had said things about another
brother, David, then 17, that worried Mary. "It was little things
like, 'David is bad to me, but Mom tells me he's sorry and I have
to forgive him,' " Mary said. "I said, this is my voice coming out of
her." Mary warned the ministers that she would press charges
unless something was done. Nothing happened. So Mary went to
the police. After the detectives came knocking, the community
voted unanimously to excommunicate Mary.

Mast took a break from hammering in his workshop to explain the
concept of excommunication to me. When Mary left her home,
she broke her vow to uphold the Ordnung. The Amish believe that
anyone who breaks that vow is damned and must be shunned.
Church members may talk to her only to admonish her to repent
and return, Mast said. He stroked his full beard as he struggled for
the right English words. "We would tell Mary that we think she
done wrong and tell her to come back," he said. "We couldn't take
her word for anything. We would have nothing to do with her."

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 COUNTY, 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 did. "We have to
deal with the sin if it's once, twice, or thrice," said Chris
Kauffman, the most respected bishop in the Mt. Gilead area of
Ohio's Morrow County.

Yet Levi Schwartz, who lives in Mt. Gilead, said the church's
reliance on repentance failed him. "Sometimes I went into the
bedroom and cried because of my sin," he recalled. In 1989
Schwartz started molesting one of his daughters. He kissed the
girl, rubbed her, and bared himself to her until she grew old
enough to date, and then he moved on to her younger sister. On a
late fall night in his cavernous living room, the 52-year-old, who
has since left the Amish, talked about his past with unnerving ease
while one of the daughters he molested sat on a nearby couch. "I
confessed in church a number of times," Schwartz said. "I wanted
to be clean, so I took it to the ministers. I thought that would give
me grace, and the power to overcome it."

Schwartz said his bishop, Eli Raber, discouraged Schwartz's
sporadic attempts to get counseling. (Raber declined to comment.)
In 1994, Schwartz's son Benjamin began touching his sisters; he
confessed in church and was shunned for two weeks. Levi
Schwartz, however, was losing faith in the church's method of
punishment. After one of his daughters started crying while he
was molesting her, Schwartz checked himself into Oaklawn
Psychiatric Hospital in Indiana. He asked the girl to pray for him,
and she did.

When Norman Byler's family sent him to Mercy Medical Center
in Ohio, he received a week of counseling and was given
antipsychotic medication and antidepressants, which he burned
instead of taking. Still, Yoder believes the "doctoring" helped his
father-in-law. "I felt like we had him half decent under control,"
he said.

But pedophilia is a hard disease to treat. Deborah Love, an
English neighbor who lived next to the Yoders, saw Norman take
his 3-year-old granddaughter into his woodshed on a fall day in
1999. She knew that one of Norman's daughters had recently
moved her family to Iowa after saying that Norman had asked to
sleep with one of her girls. "He was with me enough. He wasn't
going to be with my daughter," Love said the woman told her.

A day after Norman took the 3-year-old into his shed, Love
noticed some dried blood on the girl's leg. She called Guernsey
County Children's Services. The Amish accused Love of lying,
and she said she has felt their anger. When some of the men
passed her house, they raised their hats and turned them sideways
to avoid looking at her. Love's husband said that one young Amish
man warned him during hunting season that, "Accidents do
happen, so you'd better be careful." In the spring of 2000, the
Loves moved out of the neighborhood.

LAST MARCH, A DETECTIVE IN WISCONSIN phoned trooper
Janice Wilson to tell her about statements that Mary and her
family had made about rampant incest in the Amish community in
which they grew up. That community is in New Wilmington, Pa.,
near where Wilson works. When she started investigating, she was
stunned to hear reports of extensive sexual abuse, and of births
resulting from incest.

Amish insiders say the problem is so common that a bishop in the
area has preached against it. Johnny Byler said that, growing up in
Lawrence County, he thought it was normal to have sex with his
sister. "Other kids would talk about it," Johnny said. When I asked
Mary's cousin, David Wengerd, whether he had molested his sister
in addition to Mary, as Mary has charged, he responded, "I'd
rather not answer."

Janice Wilson and I drove through New Wilmington, past a string
of buggies heading to the home of a local Amish man, who was
marrying off his daughter. The white houses we passed had pale
blue doors, the only touch of color allowed by the church. Wilson
was despairing over the cases she'd been unable to crack because
no victim would come forward. Her supervisor, Lieutenant Peter
Vogel, echoed her frustration, saying, "The moment we approach
them as police, they shut up, the whole clan."

When the police identify a perpetrator, however, their work in one
sense becomes easy. The Amish ethic of confession extends to
answering questions asked by outsiders. With little prompting
from the detectives who questioned him, Norman Byler admitted
to manually penetrating his 8-year-old granddaughter. He said that
he hurt the child to get back at her father, who had refused to take
Norman to the hospital to treat a torn muscle. (Most
Swartzentrubers resort to Western medicine only in emergencies.)
Raymond Byler, Levi and Benjamin Schwartz, and Johnny, Eli,
and David Byler confessed with similar readiness.

Johnny and Eli were each charged with five counts of sexual
assault and pleaded guilty, to two counts and one count,
respectively. David pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his little
sister. In September, a month before his sentencing, Johnny said
he sometimes felt suicidal and couldn't understand why he might
go to prison. "Johnny thinks, 'I did a terrible thing but I've tried to
make it right,' " said Jack Buswell, his attorney. "He feels let
down."

Yet the confessions of Johnny and other Amish offenders haven't
elicited heavy penalties. Levi Schwartz got probation and his son
has not been prosecuted. The district attorney in Lawrence County
said he had not decided whether to prosecute Mary's cousins,
Chris and David Wengerd. Raymond Byler was sentenced to four
years, even though the judge in his case found that he posed "the
greatest likelihood of recidivism." Norman Byler faced a
maximum penalty of 25 years in jail, but prosecutor Keith
Plummer recommended that he serve no time beyond the two
years he had waited to go on trial. The judge set aside the plea,
saying he was unwilling to countenance such leniency for an
offender who had shown "no genuine remorse." Norman was
sentenced to five years; before his release last month, he wrote to
the Yoders to say he wanted to come home.

The relatively light sentences meted out to these men stand out at
a time when sex offenders are punished with increasing harshness.
The fear that many pedophiliacs can't be stopped has led Congress
to lengthen sentences for child sex offenders and has persuaded
some states to use involuntary civil commitment laws to keep
them behind bars indefinitely. Why did these Amish, by contrast,
receive only mercy?

District attorneys and judges appear to be quick to forgive in the
counties that have the largest Amish populations. The 92,000
Amish who live in Ohio and Pennsylvania generate hundreds of
millions in annual tourism revenue. Brent Yager, who prosecuted
Levi Schwartz, would never say that he spared Schwartz to protect
the appeal of Pennsylvania Dutch country. But prosecutors and
judges are as steeped in the myth of the Gentle People as anyone.
"Is Schwartz getting a break because he's Amish?" Yager said. "In
some ways, yes. Is he going to reoffend? I don't think so."

In Wisconsin, where only 10,000 Amish live, Timothy Gaskell
took a harder line in prosecuting Johnny, Eli, and David Byler.
Gaskell also brought misdemeanor charges against Mary's
stepfather, for beating her, and against Sally, for failing to report
the abuse of her daughter. As a result of Gaskell's efforts, the
Kempfs were put on probation, David got a four-year prison
sentence, and Eli got eight years in prison. Johnny, however, was
ordered to spend one year at the county jail, and mostly at night.
During the day, the judge said, he could work to keep his farm
running. A crowd of 150 Amish turned out to support Johnny at
his sentencing.

IT IS HARD TO THINK OF MARY BYLER AS LUCKY, but in one respect she was: The state responded when she asked for help. Anna Slabaugh has a different story. Anna, who is the eighth of nine children, remembers reading books with her mother as a child. Fannie Slabaugh taught school when Anna was young, and though reading books was strongly discouraged by the family's Swartzentruber district, she couldn't bear to get rid of the books she had found in an abandoned schoolhouse.

Maybe it was the Nancy Drew mysteries, but Anna never felt she
belonged with the Swartzentrubers. She got upset when her father
cut off the tails of the pigs or pulled out the horns of the goats.
She liked to draw, which violated the Ordnung. And she didn't
like the constant dimness: The church allowed only kerosene,
which gives off less light than gas, and candles had to be kept at a
low glow.

Whether for wearing her cap too far back on her head or for
"acting around" in church, Anna was often in trouble. Her father
was in poor health, because he refused to take insulin for his
diabetes, but he knew how to give a good beating. Sometimes he
used the strap, a foot-long piece of rubber common in Amish
homes; at other times, he took Anna "to the woodpile" and hit her
with a piece of wood.

When Anna turned 11, she told me, her 19-year-old brother began
molesting her, stopping just short of intercourse. When he moved
away, another 17-year-old brother started raping her. (The court
documents involving Anna's family are sealed.) Anna didn't try to
stop her brothers at first. "You don't tell your brothers, who are so
much older than you, No," she said. But when she got her period
at 13 and realized she could have a baby, she started fighting
back. "He would make sure he put a lot of pressure on my top so I
couldn't breathe," she said of the younger brother.

Anna wanted help, but she didn't think she would get it from her
church. So she began dropping hints about the abuse to English
neighbors. When they didn't pick up on her cues, she got bolder.
In 2001, while cleaning house for her family's landlord, Anna used
the phone to call a battered women's shelter in Mt. Vernon, Ohio.
The counselors on the other end of the line didn't take her
seriously. But after a month of calls, the shelter alerted Children
and Family Services Division of Knox County.

When a social worker visited Anna's home, Anna told her about
the sexual abuse. She also reported that her parents were moving
the family to Pennsylvania. Laurie Roberts, one of the social
workers on Anna's case in Ohio, said she was taught in training
that sexual abuse among the Amish is pervasive, and seldom
reported. (The problem is significant enough that the counties
near Knox publish a pamphlet to educate the Amish about sexual
abuse.) Yet the county left Anna in her home. "Oh Gosh, I wish I
could get it in those C.S. people that my parents will absolutely
kill me now," Anna wrote at the time to a cousin who had left the
Amish. The social workers "say you'll have to be hurt by them
before we'll do anything about it," she continued.

Anna tried to run away. But when her parents figured out where
she was and called the woman who was sheltering her, Anna was
sent home. Fannie began locking Anna in her room. The family
moved to Tionesta, Pa., where Fannie tried to get her daughter
declared mentally ill. She took Anna to a doctor who found that
Anna's eardrum had collapsed from blows to her head and seemed
doubtful that the damage had been caused by buggy accidents as
he'd been told. Fannie next tried a massage therapist, Barbara
Burke. Noticing scars on Anna's legs, Burke called Children and
Youth Services in Clarion County. On a later visit, Burke
massaged Anna's father while CYS secretly interviewed Anna in
the basement. The agency later visited Anna at her home. But it
didn't take her into protective custody. (CYS declined to
comment.)

When Fannie found out about the CYS visit, she and Anna went
with 13 other kids to the home of John Yoder, an Amish dentist
who lived an hour and a half away in the town of Punxsutawney.
Yoder's living room had a recliner with a tin pan and some
needles next to it. Anna watched as the other kids each had one or
two bad teeth pulled. When it was her turn, Yoder shot some
novocaine into her upper gum. She shook her head and told him
that two of her lower teeth had cavities. He shot the lower gum,
and asked Fannie which teeth should go. Anna's mother answered,
"Take them all," and Yoder pulled”along the upper gum, along
the lower gum, until every tooth was gone. "After he had pulled
the last tooth," Anna remembered, "my mom looked at me and
said, 'I guess you won't be talking anymore.' "

Anna bled for three days. Her family ignored her, except to
periodically hand her a drink. She couldn't talk, but that didn't
matter, because Anna had nothing left to say. At church, she
looked away when other kids pointed at her mouth. Fannie
Slabaugh told me that Anna had asked for her teeth to be pulled.
But the detective who investigated the case, Trooper Michael
Pisarchic, said that the other kids who went with Anna to see
Yoder said that Anna was being punished. Meanwhile, CYS was
continuing to investigate. A court date was set for the spring of
2002. The bishop in Anna's district, Moses Shettler, called
Barbara Burke and asked her to testify that Anna had mental
problems. Burke refused. On the Friday before Anna was
scheduled to appear in court, soon after her teeth had been pulled,
Shettler and a group of elders visited Anna's parents. Anna said
her parents threatened two days later to take her out to the
woodpile, or worse, unless she told her lawyer that she took back
her accusations against her brothers. Stripped of faith in the state
to protect her, Anna did as she was told.

Neither Anna's parents nor John Yoder were ever charged with
abuse. The judge in Anna's case allowed the younger brother to
remain under Amish supervision as long as he had no contact with
Anna. But Anna said he returned home on the day of the hearing.
"They don't believe it's any of our business," said Roberts, Anna's
Ohio social worker, of the Amish attitude toward child abuse
investigations. But it's the job of social workers, police, and
prosecutors to make child abuse their business. The state's duty to
push past the barriers thrown up by parents and the community
can't hinge on the religion they practice. Its role becomes more
essential, not less, when adults wall off children from the outside
world.

While the authorities idled, Anna was being watched constantly.
One of her chores was taking the family's horses out to pasture,
within view of the house. On a morning in June when the animals
seemed frisky, Anna clapped her hands. The horses scattered and
she pretended to chase them, cutting across the field to a mailbox,
where she dropped off a letter she'd written to Burke. "Are you
still willing to help, or am I not welcome?" she wrote. "I need to
get out of here." She asked Burke to put a message in a plastic
bottle for her and leave it in a ditch by the mailbox. Two days
later, Anna spooked the horses again, and a message was waiting.
"Our arms are open to you and so are our doors," Burke promised.

Anna burned the note with a lighter and went home. It was her
turn to make supper. She lit the stove, began heating water, and
sat down to write a letter to her family. The sun was falling when
she finished. Anna climbed out of the kitchen window and ran.

WHEN MARY BYLER LEFT HOME, SHE THREW HER WHITE CAP onto Sam Mast's driveway and screeched off in the car of a woman who took her in. In the two years since, Mary has driven by her mother's house a few times in a black Grand Prix.  "If Mary wants to get away," Sally asked Eli's lawyer, Greg Lunde, "why does she keep coming back?"

When I caught up with Mary, six months after she left the Amish,
she insisted that her mother and her brothers were dead to her. But
in the kitchen of the spotless trailer she rents next to Wisconsin's
La Crosse River, she couldn't stop talking about them. Cracking
eggs into a mixing bowl to make sugar cookies - never mind that
it was after midnight - she dwelt on how much Johnny, Eli, and
David loved her baking.

Though Mary can't quite leave her family behind, she ran from the
church and didn't look back. She pierced her ears last March,
earned a GED in April, and got a driver's license in May. A friend
bought her the Grand Prix, and Mary paid him back on the $8-an-
hour salary she earns cleaning a hospital in La Crosse.

Mary took me out to her car to play a Loretta Lynn cassette.
Dressed in shorts and a tight pink T-shirt with a white angel on
the front, she shifted a Doral cigarette from her right hand to her
left so that she could jab more effectively at the seek button on the
car stereo. She was looking for one song: "Hey, Loretta." When it
started, Mary jerked her head to the beat. "Goodbye tub and
clothesline, goodbye pots an' pans," she belted out, flinging her
hair and pounding her right leg. Her nails painted a matching pink
and a silver necklace hanging from her neck, Mary didn't care
how many Ordnung rules she was breaking. She was drunk on
freedom.

Nadya Labi is a senior editor at Legal Affairs.