Thank God a 16-year-old Texas girl had the courage to call a family violence shelter last week. She was desperate to escape her life as the abused Wife No. 7 of a 49-year-old pedophile at the local polygamist compound.
She was forced to marry him at 15. He made her have sex with him and routinely beat/choked her. She was now pregnant and being held against her will.
Her phone call triggered massive raids by law enforcement officers and family protective services. As a result, all 416 children at the compound were taken into protective custody, along with more than 100 women (primarily mothers).
Police have not identified her or made any arrests in connection with the accusations. But chances are she is, for now, safe in their custody.
Those calls also served to expose the reality of the polygamous lifestyle, a far cry from the essentially benign lifestyle depicted on Global TV’s Big Love Thursday nights.
Big Love is polygamy mixed with suburbia, and Bill has to juggle the demands of three wives while his high stress is intermittently exacerbated by vision problems that stem from excessive use of Viagra.
The show’s website claims it’s “bold” and “funny.” But there’s nothing funny about what is going on at the compound in Texas or a similar compound in Bountiful, B.C.
An affidavit released by Texas authorities details the accusations of physical and sexual abuse of children, including a “pervasive pattern of indoctrinating and grooming” to condition them to their roles as sexual slaves (young boys are trained to be sexual perpetrators when forced to marry underage girls).
According to one spokesperson, “We believe we’ve collected enough evidence to demonstrate that every child was abused or was in imminent risk of being abused.”
Those are chilling words for people who cater to the “state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” philosophy that, in this case, would essentially grant adults the right to sexually abuse an entire population of children at will.
This fundamentalist Mormon sect also has its claws dug deep into Canadian children. Bountiful is a polygamist colony of about 1,500 residents, whose leader (with at least 22 wives and 100 children) brazenly advocates it is a man’s duty to marry as many women as possible and create as many children as possible to get into heaven.
Most North American men would consider that lifestyle to be more hell than heaven, but the Bountiful men have been left to carry on as they please for more than 60 years — even though polygamy is prohibited by the Criminal Code and has been banned for more than 100 years.
The RCMP have investigated Bountiful and recommended charges on more than one occasion since 1990, and Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham recently published a book outlining some of the horrific human rights abuses against women and children in this colony. But the B.C. government has yet to take action and, after almost 20 years of turning a blind eye to the situation, we are now all complicit in the sexual and physical abuse of who knows how many children.
The biggest obstacle is a concern that any charges would initiate a constitutional challenge, claiming anti-polygamy laws are an infringement on charter religious rights. If the courts were to strike down the polygamy laws, there are fears that it would lead Pandora out of her box and create a situation that can’t be reversed.
That may be true in theory, and two legal experts have recently advised the B.C. government it should ask the courts for a constitutional ruling before charging anyone under the polygamy laws. That would take years to meander to the Supreme Court of Canada. Meanwhile, more children’s lives are destroyed.
Far better that the charges be laid and the courts be forced to face the carnage of real lives before them than spend years in their ivory towers examining legal paperwork and contemplating charter principles.
The religious freedom argument in relation to polygamy has failed in the United States, India and Europe. Last year, the U.S. prosecuted Warren Jeffs, a prominent polygamist who is reported to have as many as 50 wives, of being an accomplice to rape by forcing a 14-year-old to marry her cousin. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
The B.C. government has twice appealed to the courts to override parents’ religious rights and force children of Jehovah’s Witnesses to have blood transfusions. They have won each time.
The only distinction between polygamy and blood transfusions (in terms of religious freedom) is that imminent harm to the child is exposed in one case, but hidden in the other.
If the courts strike down the law, all the better. Then Parliament can create laws with teeth.
A caring, civil society would never allow the sexual exploitation of children under the guise of religious freedom.
- Defender to defendant - Saturday January 29, 2011 at 9:16 am
- Grief or glamour? - Saturday January 22, 2011 at 8:24 am
- Forget blame game - Saturday January 15, 2011 at 7:48 am
