Inside the isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia where 8 men were accused of raping more than a hundred women and girls, the horrific crime that inspired the film ‘Women Talking’

In 2009, a group of men were convicted of the rape and sexual assault of more than 100 women and girls in the colony.

Among their religious beliefs, Mennonites are also pacifists who believe in non-violence.

Their ultraconservative ideologies in part fueled the silence of some women and girls, who were sedated with an anesthetic intended for cattle and livestock and sexually assaulted by a group of men in 2009.

“Due to their religious beliefs, they thought something bad, something evil was happening in the colony,” Fredy Perez, the prosecutor for the district of Santa Cruz who investigated the crimes, told the BBC.

“In the morning, they had headaches… Women woke with semen on them, and wondered why they were without underwear,” Perez continued. “And they didn’t discuss it with neighbors in case someone said, ‘That house has the devil in it.’”

But eventually, some women began to speak out, and one night in June 2009, a man was caught inside a home and held by other male members of the community. The young man implicated eight others in the assaults — all of whom were Mennonites within the Manitoba Colony, except for one.

Perez remembered a conversation he had with a police officer after the men of the colony reported them.

“He told me, ‘Doctor, some Mennonites have brought men here who they’re saying are rapists,’” Perez said. “The image we have of Mennonites in Bolivia is that they work from six in the morning until nine at night, they’re very religious, and they don’t dance or get drunk. So when I got that call from the officer, I just couldn’t believe it.”

In August 2011, seven were sentenced to 25 years in prison at Palmasola, a prison complex in Bolivia. An eighth man got 12 years for supplying the anesthetic drug and has since been granted conditional release.

Source: BBC, Time Magazine