Over the course of four years, 130 females of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia reported that they’d woken up with raging headaches, bits of rope in their hair, pain “down below,” memory loss, and blood and semen stains on their sheets. For the townsfolk there was no other explanation: a demon was raping their women.
Well, actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Initially, no one even believed the women. They chalked it up to “wild female imagination.” Then, when too many incidents occurred to too many families to continue denying the problem, they agreed it was a “plague from God” before settling on the demon/ghost theory.
Secluded from the rest of society and inexperienced with supernatural sexual assault, the Mennonites of Manitoba Colony, Bolivia didn’t know what to do. So they did nothing. And the females continued to be raped, repeatedly (so often that some lost count), between 2005 – 2009.
Of course, it wasn’t a ghost or a demon committing the serial rapes. It was a group of nine men in the community, ages 19 – 43, who used a spray—concocted by a veterinarian to anesthetize cows—to essentially roofie entire households in the dead of night. Two of them were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home in 2009 and they ratted out their cohorts. They were turned over to the Bolivian authorities and, in 2011, they each received 25-year prison sentences for their crimes, which were harrowing, to say the least:
Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately [said] that men and boys were raped, too.
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, who initially reported on the serial rapes for Time, went back to Manitoba Colony for a follow-up piece, published in Vice, and what she found was depressing. Not only were the victims denied professional counseling (by the men in their colony) after the crimes and the trial, but the entire community is discouraged from speaking about it at all, as though nothing ever happened. But it’s worse than that.
[O]ver the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that – despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail – the rapes by drugging continue to happen.
Of course it’s still happening. And it’s indicative of a few things.
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