Shame, Secrecy, Spirits: The Trauma of Mennonite Women

TW: References to rape, sexual assault and violence against women

About 150 kilometres north-east of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the Manitoba colony of Mennonites reside in relative obscurity. Similarly to the Amish of North America, which many Westerners will be familiar with, the Mennonites are a small, conservative Christian group that reject modern living and technology: horse-and-carriages lumber along dirt roads in place of cars; women wear long, printed dresses reminiscent of the nineteenth century; rather than the native Spanish of Bolivia, the children grow up speaking Plaudietsch, a Low German dialect that emerged during an era when Royal Prussia existed as a territory.

The naïve assumption might be that life is relatively uneventful for a small, quiet, self-sufficient community like this one. Traditional values of family, simple living, cooperation and obedience should logically correlate with minimal conflict. Yet, a decade on, Mennonite women are living in the shadow of a four-year period where hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults took place, some involving disabled adults, pregnant women and young children.

It must be demons, said the general consensus. No one could make sense of it—how could something so unthinkable occur at this scale, and yet no one had any memory of it? In an attitude drawing eerie parallels with female hysteria diagnoses, the male members of the community dismissed the incidents as “wild female imagination”, instead believing that evil spirits were punishing women for their sins, or that they were fabricating stories to cover up affairs.

The truth only emerged in 2009 when one member caught a group of men attempting to break into a house. A local investigation revealed that an agent used to anaesthetise bulls was sprayed into the houses of the victims as they slept, sedating entire households while the female members were sexually assaulted and raped during the night. Victims would wake up bearing physical evidence that something terrible had happened—torn clothes, pain between their legs, blood and semen stains—but entirely unable to recall it. The shame and trauma prevented many from telling their own family members, let alone report what had happened to the Mennonite leaders. And while it was never confirmed nor investigated, the residents suspected that some men and young boys were also targeted.

Eventually nine men were handed over to the Bolivian authorities—eight perpetrators and one accomplice, the supplier of the anaesthetic—and sentenced to 25 and 15 years in prison respectively. It provides little comfort for the women who remain in the Manitoba colony: an implicit trust once held amongst the members of this tiny commune has been irrevocably broken. Windows have been barred and doors locked; some families sleep in their basements for protection; victims cannot access therapy or counselling in Bolivia without Spanish fluency, and Manitoban leaders rebuffed the idea of providing such a service in the first place: “Why would they need counselling if they weren't even awake when it happened?”. Instead, they are pushing for clemency for the imprisoned, citing the importance of forgiveness within their religion and the possibility of false testimonies. Though no new legal case has been opened and the offenders must serve at least two thirds of their sentence before being considered for parole, the timeframe is too close for comfort: one has already been conditionally released (the anaesthetic supplier), another is alleged to have escaped to Paraguay, and the rest could be roaming the community freely again as soon as 2028.

The stigma continues to follow the women, some of whom are too ashamed to go to church and fear they are no longer suitable for marriage. What’s worse, it’s believed these drug-laced rapes are ongoing. In a micro-society where women cannot be leaders, vote for them or even represent themselves in a legal case concerning their own rape, the danger of being controlled, silenced or coerced into altering or retracting statements is very real. They are vulnerable, and will continue to be so long as the patriarchal structures that dominate the globe are upstanding.