can see the TV movie already.......
Documents: Sect Married Girls at Puberty
By MICHELLE ROBERTS - 58 minutes ago
ELDORADO, Texas (AP) - A polygamist compound with hundreds of children was
rife with sexual abuse, child welfare officials allege in court documents,
with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached
puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.
The documents released Tuesday also gave details about the hushed phone
calls that triggered the raid, by a 16-year-old girl at the West Texas
ranch
who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. Days after raiding
the
compound, officials still aren't sure where the girl is.
Officials have completed removing all 416 children from the ranch and have
won custody of all of them, 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 that all the children were removed on the grounds that they
were in danger of "emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse." Another 139
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.
McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as
they
reached puberty and were required to produce children.
Patrick Peranteau, lawyer for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints, did not immediately return a phone message seeking
comment Tuesday.
An unknown number of men and women church members 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 to comment.
The compound was raided Thursday after the 16-year-old girl called a local
family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else's cell phone
and
speaking in hushed tones 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, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another
woman in the house held her baby.
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 didn't know where.
Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for church member Dale Barlow,
who
is believed to be in Arizona, but the girls' husband is not identified in
the court documents released Tuesday.
In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against
her will. If she left, church members told her, "outsiders will hurt her,
force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and (modern) clothes and to have
sex with lots of men."
At the end of the call, she began to cry.
Meisner said the agency still didn't know whether the 16-year-old was
among
the children removed from the ranch. Child welfare officials have been
interviewing the children in search of the girl and to investigate
allegations of abuse.
Investigators said some of the children 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 sexual
perpetrators,"
the affidavit said.
Children in the sect were deprived of food and forced to sit in closed
closets as a form of discipline, the affidavit said.
Former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints predicted an uneasy adjustment to foster care. The children are
likely the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those taken by Arizona
authorities 54 years ago in a similar raid.
That raid a half-century ago and the one this week pulled children of
polygamist families from the only community and culture they'd ever
known -
an event that decades later a former community member recalls as
traumatizing.
"It was total misery for them," said Ben Bistline, now 72. He was 18 when
authorities raided the remote community of Short Creek - now known as the
twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. Authorities took
200
children into custody as part of an effort to wipe out a "nest of
polygamy."
Bistline, who is now a Mormon, was not rounded up in the 1953 raid, but
the
woman he married later in life was 15 when she and her seven siblings were
shipped to Phoenix, pulled from the friends and family who constituted
their
whole world. Nearly two years passed before they were allowed to return,
he
said.
Most of the current sect members are descended from families from the
Arizona-Utah community. The sect broke away from the Mormon church after
the
latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.
The 1953 Short Creek raid also changed the community, said Carolyn Jessop,
the former wife of the man believed to be running the Eldorado compound.
The distinct pioneer-style dresses, worn over long underwear year-round
and
sewn by the women, became part of the dress code after the 1953 raid as
each
generation added more restrictions, said Jessop, who left the community
five
years ago.
Despite the new hardships for the children and women in Texas, Bistline
said
the raid is appropriate if children are being forced into marriages.
"This situation in Texas is a justifiable raid," he said.
But an FLDS member now living in the Texas Panhandle, Samuel Fischer, had
a
different view.
"It's religious persecution," said Fischer, who moved to a ranch near
Lockney with his two wives and 12 of his children from Hildale, Utah, last
year.
The Texas investigation is the state's first with FLDS, but prosecutors in
Utah and Arizona have pursued several church members in recent years,
including sect leader Warren 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 triggered some trouble.
On Monday, 41-yea
