Author Topic: Polygamist Ranch Rife With Sexual Abuse  (Read 577 times)

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Polygamist Ranch Rife With Sexual Abuse
« on: April 10, 2008, 10:47:18 AM »
ELDORADO, Texas (CBS News) ? Texas authorities say they have completed their search of a West Texas compound founded by polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.

State troopers, Texas Rangers and other authorities completed their search Wednesday. They've been at the remote ranch in Eldorado since last Thursday.

They initially went with child welfare workers to investigate possible child abuse. But they have since been executing warrants looking for evidence that underage girls were married and forced to have sex with older men.

The search was sparked by calls to a crisis line from a 16-year-old girl who reported being raped and beaten by her husband.
The scared girl, already a mother at 16, whispered into a cell phone: she wanted out. She'd been forced to spiritually marry a man more than three times her age, becoming his seventh wife.

In the call the girl said she was the seventh wife to 50-year-old Dale Barlow, adding that she first had a child with him when she was 15, and was pregnant with second child, reports CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan.

Her husband sexually assaulted her, and when he was angry, he would beat her while other women held her infant, she told a family violence shelter in a series of secret calls that triggered an investigation of the polygamist sect here.

The girl had looked for opportunities to escape before, but she was warned that outside the double-gates blocking entry to the Yearning For Zion Ranch, in a world completely foreign to her, she would be forced to cut her hair and wear makeup, and to have sex with many men - all damning transgressions in a faith where modesty calls for women to wear long underwear year-round under pioneer-style dresses.

At the end of one call she began to cry; she wanted to take it all back.

But child welfare officials allege in court documents released Tuesday that the compound built by leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was rife with sexual abuse, with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.

The documents detail the hushed phone calls, but days after raiding the West Texas compound, officials still aren't sure where the girl is. She is not named among the children in initial custody petitions by the state.

Texas authorities have legal custody of 416 children, all of those believed to have lived at the ranch, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner told reporters in San Angelo, about 40 miles from the compound in Eldorado.

Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of "emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse." Nearly 140 women left on their own.

"Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the (Yearn for Zion) Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them," read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.

Child protective services say in some of the interviews that children were "unable or unwilling to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers," reports Sreenivasan.

Meanwhile, the first of the legal proceedings that will decide the children's future began across town, reports Sreenivasan. Attorneys for the church argued that a search of the 1,700-acre compound was unconstitutional. They compared it to rummaging through the Vatican.

Church lawyer Patrick Peranteau did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment Tuesday.

An unknown number of men and women were at the ranch while authorities completed the search of the gleaming 80-foot-high temple, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, a doctor's office and housing units. Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday the adults were not being held, but if they left the compound, they could not return while the search continued.

At least two FBI agents were seen entering the back entrance of the temple on Tuesday.

Spokesmen for the FBI and DPS declined comment.

The compound was raided Thursday after the girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else's cell phone and speaking quietly to avoid being overheard, McFadden's affidavit said.

The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would "beat and hurt" her when he got angry, hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby. Once, he broke her ribs, she said.

The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to "the outsiders' world" but she didn't know where.

The girl's husband was not identified in the court documents released Tuesday. But authorities have issued an arrest warrant for church member Barlow, who is believed to be in Arizona.

Authorities were looking for documents, family photos or even a family Bible with lists of marriages and children to determine whether the girl was married to Barlow, who was sentenced to jail last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. He was ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

Authorities were trying to determine the identities and parentage of many of the children; some were unwilling or unable to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers.

The boys were groomed to be ready to marry underage girls upon adulthood and engage in sexual activity, resulting in them becoming new "perpetrators," the affidavit said.

Children in the sect were deprived of food and forced to sit in closed closets as a form of discipline, a warrant said.

The Texas investigation is the state's first of FLDS members, but prosecutors in Utah and Arizona have pursued several church members in recent years, including sect leader Jeffs, who is serving two consecutive sentences of five years to life for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old wed to her cousin in Utah. He awaits trial on other charges in Arizona.

Authorities investigating the Eldorado compound have described FLDS members as cooperative, but the house-by-house search of the temple, factories and living quarters has led to some trouble.

On Monday, 41-year-old Leroy Johnson Steed was arrested on charges of felony tampering with evidence - a day after 19-year-old Levi Barlow Jeffs was arrested on misdemeanor charges of interfering with the duties of a public servant, said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger.

He declined to give details on the arrests or how Levi Barlow Jeffs might be related to the FLDS leader.

On Wednesday, a historian on polygamy told The Early Show authorities blew it when they raided the compound.

"As I read that warrant, it sounds fairly unfounded,'' said lawyer Ken Driggs. "I think that a search (of the compound) is way over-broad. It's probably completely the wrong way to approach the problem with them."

"I'm not suggesting that there may not be problems in this community. There clearly has been a history of under-aged brides in the community.

"It's not necessarily a problem with some of the other fundamentalist Mormon groups, but I think that this just drives them away from the authorities. It underscores their sort of persecution complex, and their belief that the outside world is a hostile and dangerous place that they should not be engaged with."

Laurie Allen, a former polygamist who went on to make a documentary about the lifestyle called "Banking on Heaven," strongly disagreed.

She said polygamy is "all about the slavery of women and children and, you know, what the gentleman (Driggs) is talking about -- I mean, he makes the point, but what he doesn't understand is there's no way that you are going to go in there in the right way. ... His argument is flawed in that regard, because there's no way you're ever going to go in there in the right way. The only way you're going to go in there is just to go in there any old way. These people are so closed-minded, they're so controlled by their corrupt leaders that there's no way that you can go in there in the right way."

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