A small, immobile lump concealed by layers of hand-stitched quilts caught the Amish woman’s eye as she stepped into her youngest child’s bedroom. Pulling back the covers, she discovered her then-6-year-old daughter curled in a ball.

“Mom, there is only one way I’m going to go to school today,” the woman, granted anonymity over concerns of retaliation from her community, recalls her daughter saying. “There’s only one way that I’m going to come out from under these blankets, and that is if Jesus comes again.”

For weeks, the little girl adamantly refused to go to her Clay Township Amish school, where she was enrolled as a first-grader. Each day, her mother had to pull her out of bed and carry her to the van that picked her up for school, exasperated by the girl’s seemingly irrational tantrums.

But on that Monday morning, the girl’s words struck a nerve. The woman called her husband immediately, tearfully telling him she could never send their younger daughter to the school again because she suspected the child was being physically and verbally abused by her classmates.

Over the past 15 years, memoirs written by survivors of abuse in Plain sect communities, as well as published accounts including a 2019 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation and a joint story in 2020 by Cosmopolitan and Type Investigations, have increased national awareness of abuse.

As in any segment of American society, the physical and sexual abuse of children can happen inside or outside the home and can be perpetrated by family members, strangers or other children.

While few people who pass by a bucolic Lancaster County Amish schoolhouse might worry about the safety of the children inside, the woman whose daughter experienced abuse at the hands of other children does.

Her family, which is no longer Amish, had moved to a new Amish church district the year before their daughter stopped wanting to attend school. The woman and her husband had enrolled their elder daughter in the district’s school, and her younger sister joined her the following year.

When the couple’s elder daughter started attending the school, she became moody and often complained about being bullied by her male classmates. The couple expressed their concerns to other students’ parents, who reassured them nothing was amiss in the school.

As newcomers in their church district, they were afraid of rocking the boat, so they ignored their lingering fear that something was not right.

“I was desperate to make it work because I wanted to fit in this community,” the woman said.

But when her younger daughter invoked the second coming of Christ, she knew she needed to act. The couple had multiple meetings with the school board and were frustrated when board members told them they had no legal recourse because the girls were experiencing child-on-child abuse.

The woman said she and her husband were harassed by the school board and the district’s ministry team — usually composed of a bishop, a deacon and a handful of ministers — when they tried to advocate for their daughters. She recalls being told the girls were making up stories, that they had been asking for the abuse and that bullying would build the girls’ character. Some of the men even insinuated their father was the one abusing his daughters.

All the while, their elder daughter, who was 8 at the time, was coming home with scratches and bruises. She told her parents her male classmates would pull her hair and grab her butt, and female students would slam her against the wall.

The family left the Amish church in October. Though the woman acknowledged they had been ready to leave the Amish community for several years, she said the lack of support from the school board and ministry team were the main impetus for the family’s decision.

Risk of victimization

Multiple survivors of abuse in Plain sect communities have come forward in recent years. Four former Amish women from outside Lancaster County who experienced abuse in their communities shared their experiences.

A failed attempt to run away from her Arizona home when Misty Griffin was 18 prompted her parents to send her to an Amish community in the Midwest, which accepted her as one of their own.

Three years later, Griffin moved in with a bishop and his family to work as a maid. She experienced six months of sexual abuse from the bishop before reporting him to police and leaving the church.

Griffin, now 41 and living in Los Angeles, talked about the lack of accountability for abusers. She described a process in which abusers confess their misdeeds and undergo six weeks of shunning, during which other members of the church cannot speak to or eat with them.

Afterward, the rest of the community, including the victim, must forgive them.

While forgiveness is a key tenet of Amish culture, so is purity among women.

Girls and women who experience sexual abuse are often blamed for enticing the abusers, she said, making them reluctant to report their abuse to church authority figures.

“It can ruin your reputation,” Griffin said. “It can ruin your chance of getting married. It can ruin your life.”

Take Audrey Kauffman, 46, who lives in south-central Pennsylvania but was born in Indiana and joined an Amish community in Tennessee at 15. When 17-year-old Kauffman was raped by a community member more than twice her age, the church said she had seduced him and excommunicated her.

“It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood, and it profoundly shaped my view of myself and my body,” she said. “It wasn’t until I was almost 40 that I realized that I was not to blame.”

Kauffman said a patriarchal structure baked into Amish culture teaches girls to be obedient and allows abuse to occur unchecked.

Saloma Furlong grew up in Geauga County, Ohio, which boasts the fourth-largest Amish settlement in the nation. She faced abuse from her father, who struggled with mental health issues, and an older brother, prompting her to leave home at age 20.

Though Furlong’s family soon convinced her to return to their Amish community, she left the church for good about three years later.

Furlong cited the limited education of Amish children as a factor that causes abuse to be overlooked.

The Amish Heritage Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for more comprehensive education for Amish women and children, says Amish schools provide instruction on reading, writing, basic arithmetic and some history and geography, but students are not usually taught science, sex education, current events and the arts.

That limited education made life difficult for a curious child like Furlong.

“I asked ‘why’ questions, and I was answered one of two ways: ‘You shouldn’t be asking those questions’ or ‘Well, it’s just the way it is,’ ” Furlong said.

Because Amish children are taught not to question, Furlong said, they often suppress their memories of abuse instead of healing.

Torah Bontrager, who founded the Amish Heritage Foundation, was raised Amish in the Midwest and grew up experiencing abuse at home and in school. She escaped at age 15, determined to get a high school education.

After leaving the Amish, Bontrager said teaching herself basic human anatomy helped her come to terms with the abuse she’d experienced and witnessed when she was younger.

“The last thing you should be doing is telling the kids to shut up and not understand what’s going on,” she said.

Linda Crockett is the founder of the child sexual abuse prevention nonprofit Safe Communities and one of the forces behind Lancaster County’s Plain Community Task Force, which advocates for Amish abuse victims inside and outside the court system.

Crockett looks at the confluence of cultural factors these women faced – a lack of education in an unquestioning, patriarchal society that failed to hold abusers accountable – and sees a recipe for disaster.

“When you take those things together and then you put it into their culture, it’s almost like a Petri dish that just bubbles up with so much abuse, and nothing to really counter it,” Crockett said.

A new generation of Amish

At least one Lancaster County Amish mother is working to create change from within her community. The woman, granted anonymity for fear of retaliation in her community, began advocating for abuse victims after her son was sexually abused by a classmate in 2015 at his Bart Township school.

She was frustrated that her school board had been aware of the perpetrator’s previous offenses but did not inform the teacher or parents.

“I was just so upset with how it could have easily been prevented,” the woman said.

In recent years, the woman has noticed multiple couples walking away from the Amish community because of unchecked child-on-child abuse in schools. Some couples leave after their children experience abuse, she said, while others leave once their children become old enough to attend school.

The woman emphasized that Amish parents have no alternative to sending their children to Amish schools. Homeschooling is discouraged among the Amish, who value community. Moreover, Pennsylvania requires homeschooling instructors to have a high school diploma, but Amish people complete their formal education in eighth grade.

Sending their children to public school isn’t an option, either, as the Amish are taught to forsake secular influences. Parents who send their children to public schools would be excommunicated, the woman said.

“The Amish moms are trapped,” she said. “They don’t have (the ability) to legally homeschool in the state of Pennsylvania. If they send them to a public school, it’s going to cost them their church membership, their livelihood, their identity.”

The former Amish woman whose daughters were abused at an Amish school in Clay Township said a new generation of Amish is rising, and they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. More Amish parents are providing their children with basic sex education, she said, explaining that they should tell an adult if they experience abuse.

“We certainly have a generation coming up that wants something better for their children,” she said. “It’s never going to be fully stopped because that’s just the world we live in — a fallen world. But we have a generation coming up that is recognizing what’s happening, and they’re serious about it.”

The woman whose son was abused keeps debating whether to remain in the Amish community. Walking away from the Amish church would save her from constantly looking over her shoulder, afraid of being punished by her ministry team for her advocacy. But leaving the community would inhibit her ability to help Amish abuse victims.

“If we walk away, there’s still a lot of hurting children there,” she said. “Who is going to be carrying on the legacy? Who’s going to continue to fight?”

Critical of Amish school oversight

Each of the women granted anonymity for this story expressed frustration with the Amish group whose job it is to address the physical and sexual abuse of children inside the community and report it to outside authorities.

The Conservative Crisis Intervention Committee, made up of a half dozen Amish men, acts as a liaison between the Amish community and outside law enforcement and social services. Committee members are certified mandated reporters and as such are required by state law to report suspected child abuse among the more than 40,000 Amish in Lancaster, Chester and York counties.

The former Amish woman whose daughters were abused in a Clay Township school now works with the Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance training mandated reporters, which include teachers, medical professionals, law enforcement and other community authority figures.

She and four Amish women became state-certified mandated reporter trainers in recent years in the hope of taking over the training duties of the Amish crisis intervention committee, which is responsible for providing mandated reporter training for Amish teachers.

The Amish committee, she said, does not invest enough time in mandatory reporter training.

“If our teachers would have had the proper mandated reporter training,” she said, “they would have seen the amount of abuse that’s going on.”

Training materials used by the Amish crisis intervention committee define child abuse, highlight potential physical and behavioral signs of abuse and describe what constitutes “reasonable cause to suspect” a child is being abused. As part of their mandated reporter training, teachers also complete a questionnaire testing their understanding of the training and fill out a background certification, which questions them about their criminal history.

The Amish advocate whose son was abused in a Bart Township school criticized the language used in the training materials. For instance, she said, the first behavioral sign of sexual abuse points to a girl who is “promiscuous (a girl that is unusually ‘boy crazy’),” suggesting that female victims might be inviting the abuse.

She also noted how the training materials describe “bodily injury” in a section defining child abuse. The committee makes a distinction between “substantial” pain, which qualifies as bodily injury under the law, and less severe forms of pain.

“Punishing a child by paddling (which is permissible if the child is over 1 year old) will cause pain if it is to be effective,” the training materials state. “However, the pain should not be what would be considered by a reasonable person to be substantial.”

The woman said the committee’s recommendation to focus on children suffering only from “substantial” physical pain is overly vague, and it discourages teachers from reporting all suspected abuse.

Critical of social services oversight

The Amish crisis intervention committee’s duties extend well beyond the classroom and include finding appropriate counseling for victims and abusers as well as placing abused children in safe homes.

If professional counseling is not mandated by a court order, the committee allows abuse victims and perpetrators to decide whether to meet with a licensed psychologist or receive counseling within the church, according to the committee’s chairman, who was granted anonymity over concerns about protecting the privacy of the Amish community.

Amish counselors, he said, have a “degree of training,” though he did not describe what that training involves. All counselors, regardless of whether they are licensed professionals, are mandated reporters.

The two women whose children were abused criticized the in-church counseling option, saying counselors often recommend victims immediately forgive their perpetrators. They said seeking professional counseling is strongly discouraged by ministry teams, and can even lead to church memberships getting revoked.

With respect to finding new homes for children who have been abused by a family member, Pennsylvania law requires prospective foster parents to undergo a criminal background check, child abuse history clearance, home evaluation to ensure the safety of potential foster children and a home approval process that analyzes the household’s finances and family history. Foster parents also must participate in annual six-hour, state-approved training sessions.

The Amish woman who advocates for child sex abuse victims approves of the committee’s efforts to place abused children in Amish homes, but she said the host families should have to complete the same background checks and training as “English” foster families.

“How do they know who to choose for child placement?” the woman asked rhetorically. “The person who looks good mowing the grass?”

The crisis intervention committee generally picks people who are grandparents and childless couples as host families. Because child placement in Amish households is often a short-term solution, the committee chairman said, the committee does not conduct background checks and evaluations. Amish host families also do not need to be registered as foster parents to take in abused children.

After the Amish committee picks a host family, Lancaster County Children and Youth Agency gets the final say. Children and Youth has never vetoed an Amish host family selected by the committee, the chairman said.

The Amish child sex abuse advocate wants county and state authorities to work directly with members of the Amish community who experience abuse, rather than using the committee as a go-between.

“Stop coddling the system and acting like it’s different,” she said. “We’re human beings. We’re capable of lying, we’re capable of stealing, we’re capable of kidnapping. … Stop protecting the image.”

From Lancaster Online, August 25, 2024