I wrote about a rather extreme example of this in an article last year about an Amish activist who is fighting against a Supreme Court decision from decades ago that allows Amish people to keep their children out of school.

Torah Bontrager was sexually abused for years and had nowhere to turn because her community was essentially her extended family. She didn’t have the legal right to go to school and form ties with the broader community, her command of English was poor anyway, which would have made the Internet and phones less useful to her even if she had access to them, which she didn’t.

Eventually, she ran away in a harrowing nighttime escape that I’d love to see made into a film one day. The broader community was her salvation. She scrambled for an education and was eventually accepted to Columbia. Today she advocates for the education rights of Amish children along with a partner from the Navajo Nation she met at Columbia, who advocates for native children who are often denied education and networking with the broader world thanks to the same Supreme Court decision.