Shunned Amish Woman interview-Mary

you want to knit while we talk crochet crochet while we talk yes okay cool I like that it's a one of the tools that I use sometimes to talk about the things that I've experienced in life you understand we all need tools to manage all right Mary Mary where were you born where you from originally I was born in Pennsylvania to an Amish family I was the sixth child and the only girl at that point in time my parents had um three more Sons After me when I was uh five my seven-year-old cousin my uncle and my biological father were all killed in a tragic car buggy accident my biological mother got remarried when I was 12 to a widower from Wisconsin but before that happened we had lived in two other Amish settlements there were old order Amish in Western Pennsylvania um he had from a previous marriage he had I believe nine boys or eight boys and five girls something like that there's like 23 of us with with all this step siblings and then we moved to Wisconsin and I lived in two different older ramish settlements in Wisconsin in um 2004 when I was 19 I escaped from the abuse that I had experienced and I ended up reporting it and there were five people and my immediate family that were arrested and prosecuted for crimes they committed can I ask you what kind of stuff was going on um abuse of all types there was religious trauma there was child sexual abuse there was physical abuse there was emotional abuse is that typical for the Amish community you know part of what happens when I talk about why I escape is far too often people respond with this well but you could have just left on R Springer which is a stereotype the idea that we get to go out and experience the world and then make a decision without any repercussions that that's the Community before you're 18 I think um the thing is is that in the five settlements I lived in specifically we didn't even have room spring we said we went with the young folks and we didn't get to go out and live in the world and experience the world and we most certainly didn't have a choice to be in the world and not practicing Amish and not have repercussions for that and so part of what happens is there's a lot of stereotyping of Amish people and stereotyping inherently when you talk about stereotyping people if we sit there and we say these people are all good or they're all bad we're inherently harming the very group of people we're talking about and I say this as somebody who repeatedly hears reports of people who are committing suicide or perhaps that's not quite the right way to say that maybe they're they're dying from suicide um because of the lack of access to appropriate resources I believe and often rpr is a large part of what the stereotyping plays into because people think that we could have just left and another part that is greatly misunderstood is that every Amish settlement inherently has different rules and those rules are in fact so um diverse like in one settlement they may be allowed to have buggies with battery lights on them and in a different old order Rish settlement they may not be allowed to have buggies with battery lights on them and and when we sit there and we say the Amish inherently it tends to be that people don't understand that it can be common it can be uncommon there are certain things that are inherent so for the settlements I lived in specifically when we went with the Young Folks at we would say the ages varied it would be from like 16 16 and a half 17 those were the typical ages and what we were expected to do was to find somebody to get married to we would go to the youth groups that they called the singings on Sunday evenings and then after that each settlement had different practices on how they allowed their youth to date some settlements allowed bed courtship um some settlements absolutely did not allow bed courtship that wasn't a thing that was even acceptable and the other part is is settlements don't necessarily affiliate with each other so we can't just say the Amish do this I can say that this was my experience inside of these five Amish settlements and we also can't say even though experience crimes inside of each one of those settlements I still can't say that all Amish are bad people or that all Amish commit crimes rather it's that Amish are people just like any other group of people and some of them commit crimes and when we have a culture of silence and we have a culture where we abour or or shun [Music] education it tends to create differences and how people understand the world around them and also when we consider the language differences I grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch or Dutch that we we just called it Dutch really and I didn't learn how to speak English until I went to school when I was 6 years old and so inherently many Amish people most Amish people that I know are English as a second language speakers and how that affects people when we go out into the dominant culture and we try to assimilate into dominant culture can vary um depending on the degree of insolar insularity that the settlement had that they were a part of or even depending upon what their family practiced because sometimes not just the settlement might have different rules from their neighboring settlement um because the ministry gets together they might have different Church districts and every spring and every fall the ministry gets together and they rewrite the rules for that settlement and inside of each Church District it's the Ministries responsibility to write that rules the aning brief the ordinance brief and then they take it to the church and the church is supposed to have a rote on it which is kind of like a vote when I was baptized into the church I was 17 years old and I was told that anytime there is a row I'm not allowed to wrote against whatever my stepfather wrote it as because my vote had to support him to be submissive to the authority of the head of the household but when you also consider that in 2021 I Co wrote a a research study on child sexual abuse within Amish menites anabaptists and other religious communities what we discovered without a shadow of a doubt is child sexual abuse does exist within Amish settlements and homes and then you consider one of the questions that we ask the respon was if you were taught that child sexual abuse was a sin what was it called and some of the answers were things like a moral failure or even a sin of lust or sex outside of marriage a sin of Darkness part of me has to ask is this a thing where religious language around crimes affects how we think about it and how we talk about it and maybe social workers and people who come in contact with Amish people could benefit from understanding better simply the language differences or even understanding that sometimes um using translators or interpreters we need to use people and do our best to provide services from people who are qualified to be doing that and I believe in Pennsylvania specifically they are they are working on um having an interpreter program but I'm not quite sure where that is right now but it is something that is being worked on and you reported your family members what what was the uh aftermath of all that oh my well I was shunned in April 2004 I was told by the English neighbor that I was put in the bond the bond is like a status and then they practice midom which is the shunning the aftermath of that is something that I don't quite know how to put into good words because inherently the accusations made of me but also to sit there and watch people show up in droves for perpetrators of um child sexual abuse I'd say that um forever Alters how you think about people in general especially when those were your your family members those were your community members those were the people that I knew and to have it all ripped away I expected repercussions but I didn't expect the church to put me in the bond without following their own rules the ministry was supposed to come talk talk to me but they didn't and it's interesting because you know when I was baptized I promised that I wouldn't tell Church business to Outsiders and um putting somebody in the bond is church business but it is very interesting that the neighbor had to tell me that they put me in the bond and then it is interesting how they wrote letters on behalf of the perpetrators and how they rallied around them and how some of them even got up on the witness and and testified for them and how people that knew me were being questioned by law enforcement about my whereabouts because apparently the settlement that I escaped from they couldn't contact social services or DHS or you know any of the people that would investigate child sex crimes they couldn't contact them but they could call local law enforcement with blatant lies about me when it was physically impossible for me to be there doing what they said I was doing I ended up joining the Army to get out of that state because first I moved when I escaped on February 16 2004 I wasn't too far from the settlement I escaped from but then I moved and as the court cases went on I moved again I moved further away and when my friends were being questioned my co-workers were being questioned I asked law enforcement what can I do because I'm not doing these things and I don't know how to make it stop and they said really the only thing I they know is like to to move away I moved again I moved 2 and 1 half hours away and then I moved again and then I moved again and I still wasn't any closer than 2 and 1/2 hours away And yet when I went to the gas station to get gas one day there's a whole vanload of Amish people sitting right there and maybe they didn't know that I was there I don't know but at that point it solidified the idea that I need to leave the state I legally changed my name and I joined the army and the Army took me out of Wisconsin the Army also gave me different a different perspective different set of values introduced me to a whole bunch of different people and getting to know some of those people taught me that inherently groups of people around the world have problems they have crimes that are committed but how people handle those problems matter if they have crimes that are being committed it matters how they handle it and what they're doing about it and I also learned that English as a second language really does affect the way that we communicate um one of my battle buddies actually explained it to me when I was in medic school it was uh pretty interesting to hear and get to know from so many people from so many different walks and ways of life because they taught me things about myself and about where I came from that I didn't even consider or think of until they gave me the space to do so and that inherently in and of itself is beautiful and then after that I ended up pregnant and I got chaptered out of the army because I didn't have a family care plan and it kind of felt like a betrayal but in the same token I wasn't able to do what I needed to do because both both parents of this child were active duty and so somebody had to get out and I did what I had to do and then um in 2008 I started going to college for and I obtained my associates degree in 2010 and I was still married to somebody who was active duty and we went from different military bases we ended up moving overseas and I lived in Germany for 5 years um we did separate and get divorced while I lived in Germany sometimes it's really hard to get to a place where you can be okay with who you are inside and sometimes we do things because we think it's expected of us we feel like it's the right thing to do according to everybody around us those values I found it beneficial to examine where my values came from because inherently when you can't stand yourself and you feel like a part of you is from such a terrible place from such a terrible group of people if you are demonizing an entire group of people and specifically a group of people that is your culture your heritage and you know to be Amish is not just not just a religion or a culture it's also a business there's there's branding about Amish and that is why it's so powerful because there's a whole tourism industry if you look at Lancaster County alone I believe in 2022 it was estimated about 2.4 billion dollars in Amish tourism well tourism maybe not all of it was Amish but if you've ever been to Lancaster County you know that a lot of Tourism there comes from Amish and there's a whole genetic component where there's an entire database that um covers Amish menites hites and their specific genetic disorders it even delineates it by Amish or menonite or huate furthermore there's there's even specific genetic disorders that um run in my family and um from from in breeding it's they call it the founder effect in research primarily it's because for almost 400 years when we split from the menites um because the menites didn't practice shining right um we've we've been marrying our second and third cousins for almost sometimes fourth and fifth and sixth cousins for almost 400 years and when that happens you get the recessive traits becoming dominant and that can result in genetic disorders the type of Amish that I was we rarely like we we didn't see people joining us or even if they attempted to join us you know they they would always be of a lesser status because it was a privilege to be born in the church but anyways the point is that is my culture that is my Heritage it's in my me and I can't outrun that and around 2018 when um I had well actually let's let's back up a little bit around 2014 I had been dating somebody and the relationship itself was fine except for one thing I could not I could not bring myself to be intimate with this person and that's when I had to really examine the internalized homophobic ideas about myself because I felt like it was fine for other people to be gay or queer or trans or gender fluid or all of these things but it wasn't fine for me because if I was that i' probably would go to hell and one of the most freeing things was having the space to be able to process that and understand what I believe and that is we are who we are and who we're attracted to is just one faucet of who we are it doesn't change who you are inherently to be queer it really doesn't your values remain it doesn't give you any less value to be queer and to be openly queer and so so I made a commitment that I was going to live my life out loud and in color and that is part of why this dress even though the dress didn't happen until like 2020 because of things it takes time but you're wearing an Amish dress omish style dress but it's very colorful well there's a few things there's a few modific just a few like I just want to point out this stitching would have never been allowed in myish settlements none of them all five of them that would have been straight to jail you would have been done for stitching this stitching oh no that's way too fancy the color absolutely not um like for example like we had a two finger rule so like my hair is not properly displayed because like you know I don't know if that was the church's rule or my stepfather's rule but it was two fingers and width of hair was allowed to be displayed hair was supposed to be parted straight and then combed to the side if it went straight back that was too worldly this your covering so this is a covering by the way and I just want to say this because a lot of people don't understand this is a cup it is not a bonnet okay this this is supposed to be tied and properly tied because if it's not properly tied you know well that's that's just not okay either and um you know this this is absolutely not allowed having this embroidery stitching on it not allowed um this cape is a little too narrow the dress itself is a little too short our dresses were supposed to be exactly 8 in from the floor in the last settlement that I lived in the um hemming here this is way too wide and the color itself oh no never but the type of fabric that this is this is actually the type of fabric that my workdresses were made from that I would wear during the week I got the right kind of fabric and the shoes we would have never been allowed to wear two-ton shoes the heel is too high and this is a little too fancy but the stockings right here those are the right kind of stockings they're they're they're the right kind because sometimes reclaiming your heritage means making things the way you wish you could have made them when you were practicing those beliefs and held those values as the end all be so for me it felt freeing to be able to remake this into something that isn't quite so doesn't feel quite so oppressive and it doesn't make me feel like I have to slump my shoulders and and make myself small which is like you know and when we were sitting in church um we would be expected to sit like this um to make yourself small yep you would see rows of arish women just sitting like that sometimes they would sit like this but yes it was very much a reclaiming of this is my Heritage and you can't take that from me but also this part of it where I know how to draft a dress pattern based off of measurements for this specific settlement like I can do that but I can also make it something that isn't oppressive to me and there's a lot of Beauty in that to be able to recreate things that you can find joy in and that you can find peace in and that you can find a way forward and then you can look at it and say well this is more me than that ever was and I think that gave me a certain kind of piece with like the dress itself oh and and this part these sleeves are a little too snug so yeah do you talk with your family at all my biological mother my oven she um passed away I believe in 2017 um I tried to build a healthy relationship with her for many years and I don't know that I'm really in a space to speak about that publicly because there's a lot and she was one of the people that was prosecuted for failure to Aid a victim and report a crime and she was one of the people who if you watch the doy series sins of the Amish the prosecuting attorney reads from the letter she wrote him about me but she she was a person who I'm very sure had her own trauma however when you have children you have an obligation and responsibility to them and I do think that people can do better as Maya Angelo says people when they know better they can do better and sometimes people who know better or who are are informed of better they were they reject that and they choose to continue down a pathway of um destructive Behavior towards people they Proclaim to love other than that um 2018 was the last time I spoke to my practicing any of my practicing Amish family but ultimately I was also told never to come back by someone I care deeply about but I also think that's part of the harm of shunning because shunning inherently tears apart families shunning demonizes people and I kind of feel like going back to the whole stereotyping and bias thing when when you stereotype people when you stereotype people who leave for people who are not practicing you know and you make them into you make it into an Us Versus Them thing and then it leads to bias and then inherently it enables harm against those people and you know the other thing is say what kind of a choice is it really to be baptized into the Hest Church versus like going out into the world and knowing that you're perhaps never going to be treated like you you probably aren't going to be invited to weddings and you know you might not be um allowed to attend funerals or you know you might not be allowed to sit with the family at the funeral because all of a sudden you're this really bad person and I don't know that it's necessarily just because I left that I'm this really bad person it's potentially exacerbated by the fact that I'm this bad person because I reported abuse to Civil Authorities who prosecuted and what leads me to that conclusion is that you know other people who were also shunned from that settlement they can attend funerals that I'm asked to stay away from they can attend funerals and walk through and view the dead as is customary for our culture uh um but I was sent an escort of 12 men to tell me I'm not allowed to walk through and view my brother that passed away in 2004 because it's my fault that they went to prison and that they can't be here for his funeral so it's only fair that I'm not allowed to view my brother that passed away and the other thing is is that the effects of shining itself can also vary in different families like even from settlement to family how they shun people may vary based on what they perceive is the appropriate type of shunning but then I think it's also important to have Nuance here where people can perhaps understand that this is what I experience and other people may experience it differently and it doesn't mean that either of us or any of us are wrong when we talk about our experiences specifically but it does mean that there are varied experiences and you know in conclusion I would say you know you can take the you you can you can get out of the Amish community you can get out of the settlement but you can't take the Amish out of the person and the other thing that I would say is that you know there's the plain people's podcast out there which tells stories about plain people and that can be inherently helpful to under for Outsiders to understand what some of the differences are and yet similarities in a Baptists are not a monolith just because you see plain people doesn't mean that it's Amish people people can live a plain lifestyle and dress plain and be atheists and I would also say that abuse happens within groups of people around the world and I'd ask you to ask yourself where do you stand on the issue of combating abuse where do you stand on this issue what action have you taken to prevent it from happening are you part of the problem or part of the solution Choose Wisely you can't be both those are some of the most profound words that anybody has ever said to me and I cannot disclose the person's name but a person said this to me many many many years ago go and and it really struck me as being a profound way of looking at like I am a person and I may be only one person but where do I stand on this and I think sitting with that and sitting with the uncomfortableness of perhaps everything that you thought you knew was maybe just a little bit too broadly defined off of the experiences that eliminated experiences of the most marginalized people within Amish communities and maybe you could benefit from learning more about the experiences of the most marginalized within Amish communities thank you all right Mary thank you very much

Channel: Soft White Underbelly

Views: 1,443,240

Keywords: soft white underbelly, swu, Amish

Id: pyCX5Y9wia0

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024