Bolivia or not

I have my Google News page set up to let me know when cer­tain words come up in news arti­cles around the world.  It lets me know when some­thing note­wor­thy hap­pens in one of the towns where I used to live (or a town some­where else in the world with the same name).  Among the other things it draws to my atten­tion is any news arti­cle with the word “Men­non­ite” fea­tured promi­nently in it, or at least the three most recent arti­cles from cred­i­ble news sources.  Usu­ally it just allows me to keep informed on the Penn­syl­va­nia and Vir­ginia high school sports cir­cuit.  Last week how­ever it brought to my atten­tion dis­turb­ing news from Bolivia.

As the story goes, in this iso­lated reli­gious com­mu­nity, with­out such mod­ern con­ve­niences as elec­tric­ity, it is fairly rou­tine that peo­ple go to bed when it’s dark and get up with the sun.  Local com­mu­nity lead­ers became sus­pi­cious when a par­tic­u­lar young man was sleep­ing late.  They then assigned peo­ple to fol­low him and see what he was up to.  Sure enough, he was observed to be mov­ing about in the twi­light hours. They became more con­cerned when they found he wasn’t the only one and that these men were seen hop­ping into people’s win­dows.  What they dis­cov­ered after that was dis­turb­ing to say the least.  It turns out that these men had acquired some kind of sleep­ing pills and a nar­cotic spray which can ren­der some­one uncon­scious.  They then used this spray on the female inhab­i­tants of these homes before they raped them.  This was con­se­quently reported to the Boli­vian author­i­ties, and the group of eight men are now in prison.  They face a num­ber of charges, includ­ing drug pos­ses­sion, form­ing a crim­i­nal gang, break­ing and enter­ing, and of course mul­ti­ple rapes.  The num­ber of reported cases is some­where between 60 and 100 cases and many of the vic­tims were under the age of 18.

The rest of the details are a lit­tle sketchy, but you can read about the case from the numer­ous news sources Google News directed me to here.

If you have expe­ri­ence with Mex­i­can Men­non­ite peo­ple or if you’ve seen the movie Stel­letLicht, you may have some idea what these com­mu­ni­ties are like.  Basi­cally, like any­where else Men­non­ites gather with some inten­tion­al­ity, they can be either lov­ing and sup­port­ive com­mu­ni­ties of faith or cold envi­ron­ments that sti­fle cre­ativ­ity, inde­pen­dence, and indi­vid­ual rights, espe­cially for women.

At first, the colony’s lead­er­ship looks fairly atten­tive.  First they dis­cover the sit­u­a­tion and then report it to the legal author­i­ties, which is note­wor­thy for a group that gen­er­ally prefers to han­dle their own prob­lems.  I think the impres­sion that most peo­ple will gather is that this is sim­ply a story of a few twisted indi­vid­u­als within a back­ward com­mu­nity oper­at­ing under inept but well-meaning lead­er­ship.  The lead­er­ship, how­ever, con­tribute to this prob­lem in a num­ber of ways.

First, their’s the drugs.  It wasn’t long ago when word first got out about Men­non­ites from Mex­ico being used as drug mules by nearby druglo­rds who wanted to take advan­tage of their fre­quent trav­els to Canada and Amer­ica as well their seem­ingly trust­wor­thy rep­u­ta­tion.  Soon after the car­ry­ing, some within the com­mu­nity became con­sumers and pro­duc­ers as well.  While some tried to deal with the issue, most lead­ers saw it as a legal issue, for the police, while they attempted to respond to the spir­i­tual aspect of it with prayer and heavy-handed preach­ing.  Also, this is a group that uses the old addage “the more you know, the more you’re respon­si­ble for” as incen­tive to know less.  Cer­tainly the lead­er­ship of any com­mu­nity can’t be blamed when drugs are brought in, but they must still inform them­selves on the dan­gers their peo­ple are facing.

Next, the sleuthing skills employed are almost com­i­cal. But before pic­ture the stake-out they used, we have to ask if this should have come to light a lit­tle sooner.  It seems to me that if this kind of thing is hap­pen­ing and it’s dis­cov­ered only when some­one sleeps in a few too many times, either the women in this com­mu­nity are keep­ing secrets, or they’re not taken seri­ously, but prob­a­bly both.  Peo­ple esti­mate that roughly half of all rapes, even in “enlight­ened” soci­eties, go unre­ported, and in almost all of those cases the vic­tim could pick her attacker out of a lineup.  Unfor­tu­nately, because of the after­math, there are a num­ber of rea­sons why these women would want to hide what has hap­pened to them, whether or not they fully under­stand it them­selves.  Still, if the lead­ers could go from know­ing noth­ing about it to report­ing 60–100 cases, then there was infor­ma­tion avail­able to them for a long time.

There was also men­tion of fights aris­ing in some house­holds when women would accuse their hus­bands of what had hap­pened the pre­vi­ous night while they were both drugged.  There is some temp­ta­tion to sym­pa­thize with the falsely accused hus­band, but let’s look at his options.  In the face of those accu­sa­tions, he has to either believe that some­thing has hap­pened and do some­thing about it, or he can write her off as a liar and life will go on as nor­mal.  By the looks of things, life went on as nor­mal, so we know what these hus­bands chose.

Clearly the women are the vic­tims here and the real offend­ers are fac­ing jus­tice but this crime was allowed to get worse because of the envi­ron­ment the male lead­ers per­pet­u­ate.  In the very least, girls should be able to talk to their moth­ers, and moth­ers and wives should be able to talk to their hus­bands and the hus­bands and fathers should be able to men­tion the sub­ject to the lead­ers.  In this case, some­where between 60 and 100 times, that sim­ple chain of infor­ma­tion was bro­ken because some­one wasn’t taken seri­ously or they knew they wouldn’t be.  Until more details come out, that will be the hid­den tragedy here.