Posted on 05/02/2008 7:27:48 PM PDT by ricks_place
The disturbing child abuse case unfolding in Texas raises difficult questions about two ideals we hold dear: Religious freedom and child safety.
The state of Texas has been criticized by church members, lawyers and civil liberties groups for removing all of the children from a polygamist compound following a raid by Child Protective Services.
(Excerpt) Read more at heraldnet.com ...
“How come a few, knew better?”
Well, a few of them weren’t severely retarded.
You post this same crap, time after time. There were no tanks. Children were not taken at gunpoint. Show me the tanks, show me children being taken at gun point.
Every body keeps asking, are you ever going to post a picture of that tank ?
It’s been reported that their leader told them to go with CPS and the women immediately hushed and complied. Would you not have had at least a “but”?
http://www.childrenshealthcare.org/polygamous.htm
Abuses in Polygamous Sects
by Rita Swan
After decades of ignoring the polygamous sects of the American Southwest, state and federal officials are now cracking down on the child abuse and other illegal activity within them. Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), has been convicted of being an accomplice to rape and sentenced to two five years-to-life terms. Mohave County, Arizona, charged eight others for sexual conduct with minors in 2005.
In March, 2006, the federal government fined one contractor over $10,000 in child labor law violations for using FLDS boys.
Washington County, Utah, prosecutor Brock Belnap is investigating deaths of children in the FLDS community popularly known as Short Creek and incorporated as Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. Child advocates have found 180 marked graves of children and 58 unmarked graves of babies in the towns’ cemeteries.
A few victims have also been willing to file civil suits in recent years. A suit filed by six of the so-called “Lost Boys” is now in settlement negotiations over the money and other reparations they seek for the psychological and economic damages inflicted on them.
Discussion and background
In 1953 state and federal agents tried to stop polygamy in Short Creek. They raided the community, jailed the men and separated children from mothers.
Polygamy has long been against the law n all states, but public sympathy turned strongly against the government, charges were dropped, family members were returned, and Arizona Governor Howard Pyle was turned out of office.
Not until the dawn of the 21st century with the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City fast approaching did the media and state government show concern for the endemic abuses in polygamous enclaves.
Incest victim reports
The catalyst was horrible enough. In 1998 a sixteen-year-old girl was ordered by her father to marry an uncle twice her age. Twice she tried to run away, but was caught. She went for help to her mother for help, who promptly returned her to her father. The father then took her to a remote ranch, beat her savagely, and left.
The girl limped five miles down a dirt road until she reached a truck stop and dialed 911. Juab County Attorney David Leavitt, brother of the governor, filed charges and won convictions of the uncle for incest and unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and of the father for abuse.
Mom shares 13-year-old with husband
The next year Utah polygamist Tom Green had a religious vision that he should proclaim his lifestyle to the world. Breaking with the secrecy of most polygamists, he and his wives went on many national talk shows. He openly bragged that he had married all ten of his wives when they were minors. One was only thirteen when he, at age 37, got her pregnant.
The girl’s mother was then married to Green. The mother encouraged and defends the arrangement. She says her daughter (by her first husband, who had died) sat on Green’s lap and wanted to marry him, so the mother was “happy” to share Green with her.
Victims of polygamy and Utah
Since polygamy is illegal, most polygamists have only one civil marriage; the others are dubbed “celestial marriages.” Many of the celestial wives register with the state as single mothers and draw welfare for their huge families. In one decade Tom Green and his dependents received more than $647,000 in public assistance.
To Leavitt, Green was a pedophile. These little girls were raised “from the cradle” to marry as children and knew only a life of polygamy, Leavitt declared. They are “victims of pedophiles, and they are victims of the state of Utah, which turned its back on polygamy for sixty years,” he said.
Leavitt filed charges against Green and won convictions for bigamy, criminal non-support, and child rape. But the judge imposed a lenient sentence in 2002; Green will serve only six years in prison, total.
Even more startling, the voters turned Leavitt out of office later that year with many saying the publicity was distasteful to them.
Exposure of polygamy abuses continues
Nevertheless, polygamy has not sunk back to the obscurity it enjoyed before the courageous girl reached a pay phone and called for help. Several women who have escaped polygamy speak out publicly about the abuses and provide material assistance for some who are trying to leave.
Civil suits have been filed by a few victims of sexual abuse. Two have won judgments and are attempting to get their money from the United Effort Plan, a communal property trust held by the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints. A judge has removed the UEP trustees and appointed new ones. Police officers have been forced to resign for practicing polygamy and refusing to enforce state laws against FLDS members. A polygamist judge was also forced out of office.
While law enforcement officials and judges are now expected to obey laws against polygamy, Utah authorities have reportedly signaled that they will not challenge sexual relationships between other consenting adults. But Utah and Arizona are now cracking down on some of the other abuses found in polygamous communities.
Fugitive prophet charged for sex abuse
Washington County, Utah, prosecutor Brock Belnap has charged fugitive prophet Warren Jeffs with facilitating rape of a minor. According to the victim, Jeffs demanded that she marry a much older man and “replenish the earth” when she was a young teenager. She protested, but Jeffs said her salvation depended on it.
In 2002, the Mohave County, Arizona, prosecutor got a guilty verdict against Colorado City mayor Daniel Barlow for child sexual abuse, but the judge sentenced him only to supervised probation and community service because of letters from his victims and other FLDS members asking for leniency.
God endorses “bleeding the beast”
Undeterred, the prosecutor charged eight more men for sexual conduct with underage girls in 2005.
The states have also tried to crack down on the endemic welfare fraud in polygamous groups. The fraud is even institutionalized as “bleeding the beast,” by which church members mean taking from federal and state governments because the government has persecuted them or their Mormon ancestors.
Two listeners paraphrased polygamous priest James Harmston as preaching that God “wants” them to take from every government program possible. God “doesn’t expect you to wallow in turkey manure. In another lifetime, we were persecuted and thrown out of Jackson County by the government. We’re entitled to everything we can get,” he said.
The reference is to Jackson County, Missouri, where Mormons were persecuted, murdered, and driven out in the 1830s, both by vigilantes and by Governor Boggs’s orders to the Missouri Militia.
Public funds support polygamous towns
With God ordering fraud, as argued by modern-day polygamists, there is plenty of it. Many plural wives claim they don’t know the whereabouts of their children’s father. As many as 50% of Hildale residents were on public assistance in 2001; 33% were on food stamps in 1998 compared to Utah’s statewide average of 4.7%. In 1997 every school-age child in Colorado City was living below the poverty level.
The twin towns have received millions of dollars from the federal government for housing and street improvements. Colorado City got $2.8 million for an airport, which prophet Jeffs has used for his chartered Lear jet.
In 2005, Colorado City’s tiny fire department received $350,000 in Homeland Security funds—the state’s third largest Homeland Security grant.
Arizona has taken over the Colorado City school system because of gross mismanagement of public funds.
In March, 2006, the federal government did fine a contractor over $10,000 in child labor law violations for using FLDS boys.
The response of state and federal government to the abuses of FLDS boys has, however, been severely inadequate in CHILD’s view.
Lost boys expelled as surplus
Most of the world first heard of the “lost boys” in 2004 when dozens came to the Utah Capitol and spoke. All said they were forced out by the current prophet, Warren Jeffs. They said more than 400 males, ages 13 and older, have been banished from the FLDS community since Jeffs became supreme ruler in 2002.
They were banished for such infractions as watching movies, ogling girls, wearing short-sleeved shirts, or listening to popular music. Their real sin, most critics say, was being surplus males in a polygamous community.
Many of the boys are taken out of school before they reach eighth grade and forced to do hard labor in the sect’s construction and other businesses on the promise that the prophet will give them the three wives they need to get into heaven.
They are taught from the cradle up that the prophet must be obeyed as God’s representative, that the outside world is evil, and that anyone leaving the FLDS will be ground to dust on earth and damned in the after-life.
Then after years of work for little or no compensation, they are expelled from the only community they have ever known. Several have been dumped out on the side of the road by their own fathers or church elders.
Several of the lost boys have committed suicide. Many are homeless. Many use drugs or steal.
“They live every day like it’s their last day and they don’t care about anything. They’re told they won’t have three wives, and they’re doomed. But they all want to go back to their mums,” said Dave Bills, who runs a foundation to help the boys.
Lost boy Gideon Barlow told of trying to give his mother a Mother’s Day present, but she ordered him to stay away. When he tried to obtain a Medicaid card, he learned that his 73-year-old father was drawing Social Security funds in Gideon’s name. Social Security allows retirement-age parents to collect money to help support children ages 16 or younger who are living at home.
Why no criminal charges?
These are shocking abuses of hundreds of children, and some legislators have asked why parents have not been charged with child abandonment or neglect. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff says the boys do not want to testify against their parents.
He points out that child abandonment is only a misdemeanor in Utah. He feels that prosecution for a misdemeanor would not change the behavior of parents who are willing to cast out their own children on orders from a man they regard as God’s representative on earth.
There are also practical considerations. “If I charge one, do I charge 800? Do I have the resources?” Shurtleff asked.
Safety net and court-supervised probation
With a $700,000 federal grant, his office has formed a “Safety Net Committee,” which tries to help the lost boys get an education, provides other resources for those escaping abuses in polygamous groups, and discusses ways to inform those in polygamous groups of available services. Some women in more “moderate” polygamous groups are on the committee, and Shurtleff praises the fact that the state is now talking “to” polygamists not just “about” them. His office has produced “a primer” about the beliefs and practices of different polygamous groups and how distressed members can get services from public and private organizations.
Brock Belnap tries to help the lost boys function in society by getting those who commit crimes sentenced to court-supervised probation with counseling instead of jail.
Emancipation bill passed
The legislature’s only response to the plight of the lost boys was to pass a law allowing children to petition for emancipation at age 16, so the boys can enter into contracts, enroll in school, rent an apartment, get medical care, or even stay in a shelter without their parents’ permission. Utah’s unemancipated minors cannot stay in a shelter for more than eight hours without parental permission.
Like most states, Utah already had a law providing for emancipation, but the law passed in 2006, HB30, describes conditions for obtaining it in greater detail.
Even this modest effort was controversial. Eagle Forum and some legislators stewed over alleged government interference in family privacy. Some feared teenagers would seek emancipation to get out of a few household chores. Others claimed it would be used to get abortions.
The bill’s supporters pointed out that a petitioner had to be able to prove he was able to support himself and manage his own finances. Few teenagers could qualify, they said.
Thus, by their own admission, HB30 was an inadequate solution for the 16- and 17-year-olds and no help at all for the 12- to 15-year-olds.
Lost boys file civil suit
The greater hope for change in a barbaric religious practice lies with a civil suit filed by six lost boys in 2004 against the FLDS and now in settlement negotiations. They seek money for the psychological and economic damages inflicted on them. An FLDS attorney says the suit is without merit because churches have a constitutional right to set their own standards for ex-communication.
Joanne Suder, a Baltimore, Maryland, attorney represents the lost boys and Brent Jeffs, who seeks damages for alleged child sexual abuse by his uncle, Warren Jeffs.
High child fatality rates
The child fatality rates in the FLDS also raise concern and questions. In 2005, Flora Jessop and Linda Walker, director of the Child Protection Project at www.childpro.org, went to the Isaac Carling and “Babyland” cemeteries in Hildale and Colorado City, videotaped all marked and unmarked graves, and compiled all available information about the deaths. Children are buried in both, but Babyland is exclusively for babies.
Among the 324 marked graves were 180 of children under the age of eighteen. In addition, there were 58 unmarked graves of babies.
Jessop and Walker also list 74 FLDS members who they know have died, but whose headstones are not in the Carling or Babyland cemeteries. Among them are 18 minor children plus eight stillbirths. Some of these children may be in the unmarked graves, they note.
Many deaths and birth defects
Jessop says she saw and heard of many deaths of children while she was growing up in the FLDS towns. After she and her grandmother went to the police and reported that Jessop’s father was sexually abusing her, Jessop was held in solitary confinement from age 13 to 16. Her room was next to the sect’s birthing center, which her uncle was in charge of; Jessop says she became aware during that period that many babies died and were buried in the backyard of the birthing center.
She also has seen many children with severe birth defects. Two of her siblings have cleft palates. Another sister was born with dislocated hips. Nothing was done about it until the baby was about 18 months old. Then both of her hips had to be broken, and she was put in a body cast for months.
Two defectors claim that some FLDS women pray to have Down’s syndrome children because such children have docile temperaments and because the mothers get $500/month in public assistance for a handicapped child.
Are causes of death recorded?
CHILD wrote to the Utah Attorney General asking if there were death certificates and causes of death recorded for all the children buried in the FLDS cemeteries. If not, we asked, “shouldn’t criminal charges be filed for improper disposal of remains? And if some of the babies died from abuse or neglect, shouldn’t that also be a criminal matter?”
The Attorney General’s office replied that they did not have the resources to investigate those concerns, but there is no statute of limitations on homicide, so if we have evidence of homicide, we should bring it to their attention.
Washington County prosecutor Brock Belnap says his office and other law enforcement agencies are investigating the deaths.
Jessop charges that the Mohave County, Arizona, coroner signed off on many FLDS deaths without even seeing the bodies.
Jessop says that until about seventeen years ago the FLDS opposed medical care. Today they have their own pharmacy as well as state-licensed physicians and nurses who are church members and live in Short Creek. Indeed, some women get far too much medication today, Jessop and others charge. They say that women are put on high doses of psychotropic drugs to keep them subservient.
Improper civil commitments alleged
Jessop also believes many FLDS girls are improperly committed to mental institutions to keep them from acting on independent ideas. Jessop says she was threatened with commitment to a mental institution if she refused to marry the man chosen for her.
In Utah and Arizona, children can be committed to mental institutions on school counselors’ signatures, Jessop says. She knows of 15 FLDS women committed to the Guidance Center, a state-accredited psychiatric hospital in Flagstaff, Arizona. A hospital record for one woman stated she was being discharged from her fourth commitment because she “atoned” for her bad behavior toward her husband, Jessop says.
Jessop charges authorities with a double standard on rescuing girls from polygamy. While massive effort was put into finding 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped by a Mormon fundamentalist to be his plural wife, law enforcement has not tried to find Jessop’s sister, Ruby, who disappeared after being forced into a plural marriage at age 14 and nearly hemorrhaging to death on her “wedding night,” Jessop charges.
Comment
Utah and Arizona looked the other way for nearly half a century after the failure of the Short Creek raid to stamp out polygamy in 1953. Now they seem to be walking a fine line of letting consenting adults practice polygamy, but filing criminal charges for some other violations of law.
The other violations are massive. In Utah, sex with 14- and 15-year-olds is illegal if one partner is seven years older than the other. Sex with 16- and 17-year olds is illegal if one partner is ten years older. Arizona prohibits all sexual intercourse with persons under eighteen years old. Unlawful sexual conduct with minors is the norm in the FLDS and some other polygamous clans, yet to our knowledge Utah has prosecuted only one case of unlawful sexual conduct in the past decade—that of the girl who called from the truck stop in 1998.
One case each of the more serious crimes of rape, facilitating rape, and incest have been charged in Utah since then, but there must be many more sexual abuses that are not charged.
No federal charges for sex trafficking
The federal government should be prosecuting the trafficking of under-aged girls between the polygamous communities in the American Southwest and Canada and across state lines.
Authorities complain that victims will not come forward nor willingly testify. Those aspects add to the state’s challenges, but they are not an insurmountable barrier to prosecution. David Leavitt won a conviction of Tom Green even though his wives would not testify against him, and a plural wife was recently compelled to testify under subpoena in Mohave County.
Are providers reporting abuse and neglect?
If FLDS does indeed now have state-licensed health care providers caring for its members, why aren’t they reporting abused children to state child protection services? Doctors and nurses are state-mandated abuse and neglect reporters. They can do the math to count backwards nine months and figure out that girls are victims of sexual abuse. If the state began prosecuting health care providers for failure to report child abuse, their attitudes might change in a hurry.
It is unbelievable that hundreds of boys have been expelled from their homes and no criminal charges have been filed. Utah Attorney General Shurtleff says the boys do not want their parents prosecuted, but many sexual abuse victims do not want their perpetrators prosecuted either. Indeed, most abused and neglected children may not “want” their parents prosecuted, but there are times when the benefits of prosecution outweigh the child’s emotional conflict.
Prosecution would at least send a message that child abandonment is a crime, and without it there will likely be hundreds more boys wandering around the Southwest. Utah’s new law clarifying their right to emancipation at age 16 is a severely inadequate tool for preventing the pain and suffering the lost boys experience.
Utah ought to make dumping a 12-year-old boy off in the desert more than a misdemeanor. Utah has a law at Utah Code 76-5-110 making it a felony to neglect a disabled child (unless the caregiver has religious objections to medical care), but it is not a felony to neglect a “normal” child.
Is polygamy a constitutional right?
Some expect that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule that polygamy per se is a constitutional right because of the High Court’s ruling against sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 58 (2003). Law professor Marci Hamilton points out, however, that the Court explicitly declined to endorse same-sex marriage in that ruling. There is a difference between the state allowing sexual behavior between consenting adults and the state giving it formal recognition in a civil marriage contract.
The state has a compelling interest in protecting inheritance and property rights of women and children and the legitimacy of children. It has an interest in preventing the birth defects caused by incest.
As a democracy, it has an interest in fostering the participation of all citizens in government. Political science professor Thomas Flanagan points out that constitutional democracies have arisen only from monogamous societies and argues that polygamous societies are inherently unequal and anti-democratic.
For all these reasons and more, polygamy should remain illegal.
Sources include John Llewellyn, Polygamy Under Attack (Agreka Books, 2004); Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: a Story of Violent Faith (NY: Doubleday, 2003); Salt Lake Tribune, March 13 and Aug. 23, 2005; Feb. 11, 14, and 19, 2006; March 2, 13, 26, and 28, 2006; and June 21, 2006; Tri-State News Network, Aug. 1, Aug. 3, and Aug. 15-18, 2005; Arizona Republic, Aug. 1, 2004; KSL-TV, Aug. 28, 2004, and www.childbrides.org.
History, facts, documentation, sources..... Just how far do you think that’s gonna get you????
(/sarc)
: )
The State of TX does not want you to see the snipers and the tank but people inside the ranch took pictures. It’s funny how all of a sudden FReepers fall head over heels in love with the government and believe everything they say. It’s amazing to me.
LOL!...nowhere...
I think they have an FLDS apologists ping list.
http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_9133640
Texas authorities cancel warrant for man accused of abusing FLDS girl
Hey, guys, I am not defending the flds men. In fact I think they’re a bunch of disgusting pigs.
When the government went in there and rounded up all the children, separating them from their mothers and dumping them in foster homes, come on, FReepers, that just can’t be right. And all on a false report.
PING!!
FReepmail to be added to the FLDS Eldorado Legal Case Ping List
I guardedly believe what the government of TX is saying at this point, but I even more believe the testimony of many ex-FLDSers, which corroborates the government’s claims.
Do you believe the ex-FLDSer’s? If not, why not?
“Separating them from their mothers,” you know, most of the kids could not identify their mothers. Many of the mothers mis-identified and obfuscated which kids were theirs, how old they were, etc. This cult takes newborns from moms and transfers them to other states, several women all breastfeed the same baby, and parents are assigned new kids or instructed to abandon their kids regularly. It’s a regular whirlwind with those people, if we are to believe the testimony of those who were in it and got out.
Therefore I doubt that much trauma occurred to those poor children beyond the traumas the cult already put them through.
The ex-flds have an axe to grind. The authorities use the ex-flds to stereotype all the others.
Well, ex-FLDS may have an ax to grind, but perhaps there is a reason for that. I find their testimony, from several states, several different years, and several different perspectives, convincing.
One might say all the Holocaust survivors have an ax to grind and thus stereotype their keepers. Well, of course they do. I believe them, too.
Or all the ex- guests of the Hanoi Hilton have an ax to grind, so they stereotype the North Vietnamese guards. Yes, they do indeed, but legitimately so, right?
You think they are all lying?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2010568/posts
I’m an Australian, it’s taking me a while to wake up:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2010568/replies?c=5
Carefully loosen your tin foil hat, it's way too tight.
Show me the tank.
no - there are two different groups - rule of law apologists and FLDS apologists -
I can respect rule of law apologists and at that level, agree with them.
I have no respect however for those that would see nothing wrong with the FLDS
How do you know that? Are you in contact with them? If so, for how long? How do you know what the State of Texas does not want? Did someone at the state level tell you that? Just curious.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.