2013 Reports of Continuing Attacks

The 2013 Reports of Continuing Attacks mark a troubling continuation in the real-life context behind Women Talking: while men convicted in Bolivia for earlier assaults were still in jail, reports indicated that similar assaults and other sexual abuses were taking place in the Manitoba Colony. The reports distinguish a legal outcome from an end to the harms themselves.

Reports During the Convictions

In 2011, eight men from the colony were convicted in a Bolivian court and received lengthy prison sentences. In 2013, while those men remained imprisoned, similar assaults and other sexual abuses were reported as continuing in the colony. The account does not specify who was responsible for these later abuses or how many incidents were reported, so it establishes continued reports, not the identity or circumstances of individual perpetrators.

Relation to the Earlier Attacks

The reports follow the attacks that had occurred between 2005 and 2009, when girls and women in the remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia were attacked at night. The discovery that men had used an animal anesthetic to incapacitate victims overturned explanations that attributed the attacks to ghosts or demons, divine punishment, alleged deception, or female imagination. The 2013 reports extend this history beyond the convictions, showing that imprisonment of the convicted men did not coincide with an end to reported sexual abuse in the colony.

Significance to the Novel

The account identifies Women Talking as both a fictional response to these real-life events and an act of female imagination. The 2013 reports therefore provide an important historical limit to a simple narrative of exposure followed by justice: convictions brought punishment for eight men, but reports of continuing abuse persisted. They frame the novel's imaginative response against a history in which legal action had not demonstrably brought the violence to a close.