UNITED STATES
Mary DeMuth
The two men approached me, heads down, hands fidgeting. One man eventually met my eyes. “I was molested,” he said. “It happens in our community, but no one talks about it.”
The men used to be Amish. Now they lived on the “outside” with jobs and wives and kids. They’d just heard me speak about my own story of sexual abuse. I looked at them both, remembering all those sweet bonnet books that peppered the shelves of Christian bookstores, these books that offered escape from modern madness, harkening us back to a simpler time. I couldn’t shake the dichotomy.
“In order to get healing,” the other man said, eyes solemn, “we had to leave the community and get help.”
We talked an hour or so, me still trying to wrap my mind around the conversation. Generational abuse.
Bestiality. Sexual perversion. Spousal rape. Physical abuse. All behind the white doors of white houses and white barns dotting idyllic countrysides. People lived with secrets they could not tell, or risk shunning or excommunication.
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