Two months ago, Wendell James Snell, age 42, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for the sexual abuse of three children under the age of 12 on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation between 2011 and 2014. “The depravity of Snell’s actions is reflected in today’s sentencing,” said Special Agent in Charge Alvin M. Winston Sr. of the FBI in Minneapolis. “When the most vulnerable of our citizens — our children — are victimized, the FBI will do everything in our power to hold the perpetrators accountable and to protect others from harm.”
Spirit Lake’s problems with sexual abuse were widespread and went on for years, if not decades, so it is heartening to see this conviction. In 2012, Michael Tilus, a clinical psychologist with the Indian Health Service, emailed state and federal health officials about what he saw as an “epidemic” of abuse at Spirit Lake. The immediate reaction was that he was reprimanded and stripped of a promotion he was about to receive.
Tilus was not the first whistleblower either. That was Thomas Sullivan, who was the regional administrator for the Administration of Children and Families and issued numerous reports about the situation both before and after Tilus. In 2012, The New York Times began one article on the situation this way:
“The man who plays Santa Claus here is a registered child sex offender and a convicted rapist. One of the brothers of the tribal chairman raped a child, and a second brother sexually abused a 12-year-old girl. They are among a number of men convicted of sex crimes against children on this remote home of the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, which has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.”
Sullivan compared the horrific situation at Spirit Lake to the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and at Penn State. And it’s easy to see the similarities in the cover-ups. But, as I wrote in my 2016 book on American Indians, “The New Trail of Tears,” the problem seemed to me more like what had happened in Rotherham, England, where investigators had uncovered more than 1,400 cases of child abuse between 1997 and 2013. There are two important similarities — the first is that law enforcement and political leaders in both cases seemed aware of the situation. And the second is that the reluctance to say anything critical about what was going on seemed to stem from a misguided sense of cultural sensitivity.
Denis McShane, the city’s former representative in Parliament, told the BBC that he should have “burrowed into” what was going on, but that “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”
Indeed, the perpetrators were mostly British Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, and those victims and families and social workers and advocates who tried to call attention to the problem were silenced. Throughout England, it turns out, there were similar incidents occurring. And only in recent weeks has the country — and the world — learned the full scale of the problem. All it took was Elon Musk tweeting about it to get the issue some attention.
There are circumstances and attitudes that make these scandals more likely. Widespread sexual abuse is a problem that festers in insular communities. In some religious communities it can become a problem because leaders are so respected or feared that no one would want to defy them. And no one wants to invite the scrutiny of outsiders — whether law enforcement or news media. But in England and at Spirit Lake, outsiders knew about the problems and kept silent.
You can begin to see the issue emerge when you start to have different expectations for the way communities behave based on race and ethnicity. A 2004 article in The New Yorker discussed the way the French have looked the other way when it comes to Muslim immigrants in the suburbs of Paris and how often their practices violate French law:
“There is the problem of divorce, consensual in France but, for some Muslims, simply a matter of a man repudiating a wife. There is the problem of polygamy, illegal in France but often, in older Muslim families, a social given. There are the welfare laws requiring the state to maintain poor households at acceptable French family standards — which, in the case of a Muslim polygamist, can mean four households, four wives, four sets of children. Then there is the problem of female genital mutilation. In France, the exciseuses — women who traditionally remove the clitoris and labia from little girls — are illegal, but many still practice secretly.”
The United States doesn’t have a problem on this scale. But there are some red flags. We have laws like the Indian Child Welfare Act that create a higher barrier for determining whether a child has been abused. Minnesota recently passed a law that would institute a different standard for whether to remove children who are Black from homes that are abusive or neglectful. The point is that all children should have the same right to safety, and we cannot pick and choose based on which group of perpetrators we think is most deserving of our sympathy.