To put a little perspective on this, substitute Scientologist for Amish. Or Catholic. Or any other religion ranging from the well established and accepted to the batshit crazy cults.
All religions should be subject to the law of the land. And while we’re here, they should all pay taxes.
That the US prison system is barbaric notwithstanding.
The community “policing” that happens in many Amish communities around domestic violence/sexual abuse issues usually consists of the victim being told that it is gods will that they forgive their abuser, while trying to figure out how their behavior drove the abuser to violence. It’s the same pattern as seen in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. Sometimes the ultra-orthodox scenario will include the abuser getting beaten up, but the Amish don’t believe in the use of force or violence, so even that modest censure doesn’t happen. I’m not sure how being told, as a pregnant 13 year old in a community that prizes female virginity, “pray about why god wanted this to happen to you” is any kind of justice at all.
I literally quoted your words, so this feeling you have is completely groundless.
And again, time and resources are invested in raising every child, regardless of the community. Many law enforcement officials in this country are very selective about which communities’ investments to respect and which not to. You may have noticed some discussion of that this summer.
First, this a prosecutorial decision (although the judge bears some culpability for going along with the sentencing reccomendation).
Second, you’re effectively saying that the Amish “policing their own” means they want (not merely allow) convicted rapists to wander free in the community. If that’s true then it’s even more reason for the state not to let them police their own in a case of rape.
Yes, we’ll all take your unfounded claim over the facts presented in the article.
Too bad for them. In a nation where rule of law is supposed to apply to all communities, they’re not supposed to choose to opt out when a verdict or sentence gives them the sads.
What happened here, according to the article, is that the local Amish community was uncooperative with the authorities and the prosecutor just gave up (perhaps because they’re a strong politicial bloc – in several places in the U.S. religious fundies get special treatment on this basis). Now replace the word “Amish” in the previous sentence with “Muslim” or “Black” and tell us the odds of that happening in those cases.
Because the victim is in the same family of the criminals. Unfortunately you are right, because in this case no related civil proceedings are present
Rape is a strong word. A young boy is violently anally raped by a catholic priest (happens all the time) not the consensual sexual act between people for mutual pleasure. Vaginally raped, orally raped.
How is this misunderstood?
A 12 year old is raped 4 to 1 and over time. Does it even matter if it was at the same time?
Any community that has this happen then shame on the community.
All rhetoric should been more around the safety of this young girl, of children.
What really sucks is that this is always the kind of justification used to excuse abuse and rape of women, that sentences that reflect the harm and brutality of the crime will “ruin” the lives of the perpetrators and they should get a slap on the wrist. As if their lives are more valuable than the victims.
No. The problem is a system that doesn’t take sexual abuse and rape seriously.
Reminding women they have no right to say no?
What about the girl who was raped? Does she not matter?
It’s prevalent across all aspects of AMERICAN and all global societies.
Except in women, who are disposable, right?
In this case, the victim apparently has to live within the same community as the perpetrators, in the same house, until she’s grown. But hey… boys matter more, right? /s
frankly, retweeting trump is more in line with being soft on pedophiles (or at the very least that particular one)
Both here and in the thread about Percentage of Americans who don’t know about the Holocaust is “shocking and saddening” you have had a problem with the words you wrote and what you subsequently said you meant. Maybe try harder, with more thought about what you think you are actually trying to say vs. what your words will be reasonably read as saying, and it would save you a lot of argument on this site.
Please note that when you said:
I doubt the rapists will get off without penalty. If they do, I would not support such an outcome.
your sloppy wording leaves you open to the accusation that you’d be happy with any penalty - including, for example, a literal slap on the wrist - but not “no penalty”, and as long as you are reassured that there was some penalty, you are happy not to know what it was because you seem to accept it as ok for them to handle it internally with no publicity.
For most of us, this is not acceptable. Justice not only needs to be done, it needs to be seen to be done.
From what I’ve read it’s both a coverup; and a system that’s hardly ‘restorative’ in any meaningful sense of the word; or particularly interested in justice.
A maximum-sympathy interpretation would be that there’s a noble theory of restorative justice hiding in there somewhere but crippled by dire implementation problems. A…slightly more jaundiced…interpretation would be that, surprise surprise, an insular patriarchy considers omerta violations, external interference, and women who don’t know their place to be maximum priority threats; men who aren’t disciplined enough to keep their abuse unobtrusive as relatively minor problems who need to smooth things over better in the future; and rape victims to be overtly unsympathetic and morally tainted.
The mandatory-forgiveness-upon-proclamation-of-repentance feature is a gloriously brutal touch; as are the cases where victims who don’t know how to shut up about it get shuttled off to church-affiliated “mental health” facilities to help keep that from being an issue.
Maybe by restorative, he means “restoring the rightful patriarchal order”? 
But people seem to mistake that term to mean “no punishment for people who commit crimes” as opposed to working to meaningfully rehabilitate people and get them to face their actions and take responsibility for them. I suspect some feel that such actions are “soft on crime” and will only lead to more criminal behavior?
Given that these children were causing dramatic damage to the children around them there’s a strong argument to be made that a community that respects the investment involved in raising a child would be particularly motivated to either aggressively rework, reject, or scrap the ones that are failing QC this badly.
Treating the fact that investments were made as an unlimited obligation to just keep making them is pure sunk cost fallacy; and making them at the expense of others is worse still.
This isn’t to say that an American-standard incarceration is necessarily a particularly sound choice; just to note that a community respecting its investments in its children can, perhaps in some cases must, mean writing a few of them off before they hurt the others.
Shit like this sucks, for more than one reason. The victim’s suffering is being dismissed and accountability is lacking, first and foremost, and it also perversely feeds into the carceral nature of our system.
The ONLY time prosecutors and judges face real public pushback is when the public thinks they are going too easy on charging/sentencing, this being illustrative. Prosecutors and judges know that they will never face real criticism for throwing the book at people and handing out decades in prison like they’re candy, and this kind of story just reinforces that dynamic.
I think you are on to something there: the process described (conceal or minimize what happened to any outside entities, impose a modest-but-definitely-nonzero social sanction on the perpetrator for perpetrating overtly enough that a fuss was raised, make a statement of ‘repentance’ a stock part of the process and make forgiveness mandatory; then apply such pressure as is needed to get the victim to STFU and think prayerfully about what they must have done wrong) is 100% what you would do if you consider the restoration of society-level order to be the primary objective; the real crime of the perpetrator to be exercising their privileges in a socially disruptive way; and the victims to be mostly an inconvenience.
Looks like the two of-age brothers got sentenced 10 years on one count and 5 years on the other, both suspended, and five years probation in addition to the terrible burden of a letter. For what it is worth.
I would assume the minors have some sort of similar punishment that cannot be reported on due to reasons.
Don’t discount the right wing romanticization of the Amish as a motivator for this travesty. There’s a big market in Christian bookstores for romance novels set in Amish communities, because the stories are so “clean” and “naturally” Christian. I’m from this area and went to public school with Amish children when they first colonized the area, which prevented me having any illusions about their society. It’s just patriarchy writ large and hard, and the women among them pay a terrible price to be there.
This.
That young woman (she’s not a child anymore, they took that from her) is going to have to live with all that abuse (it’s not going to stop, it’ll probably increase, from what I know of the abuse cycle) as well as a child out of wedlock. She will be seen by many as the one at fault, because she must have tempted them with her feminine wiles, otherwise why would all the boys do something so sinful?
There are a lot of books written by former Amish women documenting this kind of scenario. Usually the police don’t get involved, because the girls - the victims - aren’t usually that young.
This Cosmopolitan article reveals how the Amish community “polices its own.”
Over the past year, I’ve interviewed nearly three dozen Amish people, in addition to law enforcement, judges, attorneys, outreach workers, and scholars. I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret spanning generations. 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.
Exactly. Of course, the victim may decide not to stay in her community as an adult, at which point she could probably, if she wanted, find a lawyer willing to take on a civil case for her on contingency. IANAL but I have to assume a criminal conviction, even without prison time, would make such a suit much more winnable?
Many communities in the United States don’t have a choice because a black kid caught with a small amount of narcotics will likely get a lengthier prison sentence than an Amish man who rapes his younger sister regardless of how the black kid’s “community” feels about it.
