Lost Boys shelter undergoing shake-up

The Salt Lake Tribune - October 28, 2008

by Brooke Adams

For more than a year, New Frontiers for Families operated the House Just Off Bluff in St. George without a business license or proper zoning as it housed teenagers who have left a polygamous community at the Utah-Arizona state line.
Now, a shake-up - including the termination of the home's director -- is underway to bring it in line with its original mandate and city rules.
New Frontiers opened the home last summer after receiving a state grant to create a drop-in center for youth from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As approved by the state Department of Community and Culture, the non-profit was to help youth connect with services, such as counseling, schooling and medical care.
But instead, youth were allowed to live at the home, which had no licensed clinical staff, nor the proper permits.
Tracy Johnson, executive director of New Frontiers, said nine boys now living at the home will be relocated to host families or other settings and the house will be converted to a drop-in center. Last week, it obtained a business license for that use.
A licensed clinical social worker will be hired to run the center, with oversight from New Frontier's board of directors. The program will focus on helping youth get services and offering life skills training, she said.
"They've made a lot of the changes that were brought up as problematic," said Jonathan Hardy, director of state community services in the Department of Community and Culture.
The department provided an initial $95,000 grant to get the program launched in a home donated by a local benefactor concerned about the so-called "Lost Boys." This year it received a second state grant of $106,000, and the department asked the Five County Association of Governments to oversee the program, just as problems with its operation came to light.
Earlier this month, the association gave New Frontiers 10 days to correct the problems or lose state funding. In addition to the city licensing issues, concerns were raised about the backgrounds of those working with the youth.
Among them: Michelle Benward, who oversaw the program for New Frontiers under the title "clinical director." Its grant application said Benward had a Level II school counselor certificate from the Utah State Office of Education.
But The Salt Lake Tribune has learned Benward had a Level I certification that expired in 2006 and has not been renewed. She is not listed as having any other professional license in Utah, according to the Utah Department of Professional Licensing.
Johnson said Benward was terminated last Wednesday but declined any additional comment.
The Family Support Center, a Salt Lake City non-profit, has offered to provide temporary assistance to New Frontiers, said Bonnie Peters, executive director.
Peters said if New Frontiers is unable to meet the state's requirements, her agency would consider submitting a proposal to take over the program. The center now oversees the Safety Net Committee, which provides services to polygamous communities and facilitates communication with government agencies.
"If they can get [the house] together, with the appropriate support and back-up for the children, then we are happy to support them," Peters said. "If they can't, our intent is to make sure the boys have an appropriate place to go, a legitimate drop-in center with the support they need to become self-sufficient."
The program must include oversight for the youth and respect for their parents' rights, she said. "Family relationships are not going to be thrown out the window just because they are polygamists," she said.
Paul Murphy, spokesman for the Utah Attorney General's Office, said Monday he was encouraged by the partnership formed to get the program back on track. The office has backed numerous initiatives to help the Lost Boys.
"The bottom line is to figure out a way to help these young men get schooling and have a good life," said Murphy. "They are impressive young men, hard workers, they're smart. I hope things will only get better for them and the people of St. George will recognize there is a need and will pitch in to fill in the gaps."
New Frontiers' annual report said it provided services to 114 teenagers and young adults.
The youth say they left or were asked to leave their families because of delinquent behavior or disagreement with the sect's stringent religious standards. Johnson said the majority of the boys living in the home are working to complete a GED or their high school degrees.
"We've given them a lot of options and they want to stay together if possible," Johnson said. "That is going to be the hardest part right there."

This article was found at:

http://www.sltrib.com/Polygamy/ci_10829474/

Forced marriages: the trail of misery and fear in Britain

The Independent - UK
September 26, 2008

A helpline for victims has been inundated with callers. Jerome Taylor was given exclusive access to their harrowing stories

Hundreds of children fearing for their lives have called a new national helpline set up to assist victims of forced marriages since its launch four months ago, The Independent has learnt. Many are seeking ways to escape parents and family members who are trying to force them into unwanted marriages. Others have said they fear becoming victims of so-called "honour killings", because of social and sexual behaviour that their community disapproves of.

According to the first national breakdown of callers, an average of 62 victims are phoning for help every week. One in 10 is under the age of 16. One 14-year-old girl said she was in fear of her life because she had become pregnant and thought her parents would kill her or marry her off if they found out.

The Derby-based Honour Network, which began taking calls in April, is the first national helpline to give advice to those who are afraid of being forced into marriage or at risk of suffering honour-based violence.

Run by the refuge charity Karma Nirvana and initially funded by the Government's Forced Marriage Unit, the network is staffed by survivors of forced marriages who help find refuges for women who predominantly hail from Britain's south Asian and Middle Eastern communities.

According to Jasvinder Sanghera, who was disowned by her family for refusing a forced marriage and went on to set up Karma Nirvana, the youngest caller to the new helpline was 13.

"We have to move away from thinking that forced marriages and honour-based violence only affect a few people," she said. "These numbers will be just the tip of the iceberg."

Activists believe schools must do more to train teachers to be aware of the tell-tale signs that indicate a pupil might be at risk of a forced marriage so that they can alert the correct authorities without tipping off potentially violent family members.

Children who are taken out of school early and taken abroad for long periods of time are particularly at risk. In February, a Home Affairs Select Committee was told that in Bradford alone 250 girls aged 13 to 16 were taken off their school rolls in 2006 because they did not return from a visit abroad. At least 33 were still unaccounted for.

The Forced Marriage Unit, a joint venture between the Home Office and the Foreign Office, repatriates up to 70 victims a year who are forced into marriages abroad, but campaigners believe the true number is higher.

The most common age of victims calling the helpline was 17, while the Eastern, Midlands and London regions accounted for 57 per cent of all calls.

Although men can also be victims of forced marriages, 89 per cent of those appealing for help were female. Almost 80 per cent quoted "forced marriage" as the type of abuse being perpetrated, against them while 70 per centalso said they feared becoming victims of honour violence. When asked to name who was responsible for violence against them, just 13 per cent of victims mentioned husbands, while 71 per cent blamed immediate family.

"For me this is one of the most shocking, but insightful statistics," said Ms Sanghera. "It shows how violence is being perpetrated by the entire community, not just abusive husbands. That's why it is so hard to tackle and so difficult for people to escape."

Campaigners complain that historically the Government, police and local authorities have been afraid of tackling forced marriages and honour crimes for fear of upsetting those communities accused of practising them. But they have broadly welcomed legislation which from November will enable potential victims obtain an injunction halting a forced marriage.

Keith Vaz MP, head of the Home Affairs Select Committee investigating forced marriages, said he was not surprised by the figures. "The committee found that the majority of cases of forced marriage happens in the under-18s," he said. "I would like to praise the work that this helpline is doing."

Anyone wanting to contact the Honour Network can do so by telephoning 0800 5999 247

Baljit Kaur Howard: 'I was 17 and had never kissed a boy. I felt humiliated and degraded'

The home Baljit Kaur Howard has made for herself in a quiet Ipswich cul-de-sac is a world away from what she calls her "previous life". In her sitting room, a mug of tea in hand, she rests her head on her new husband, Phil. "It's taken me a long time to learn to love Phil," she says. "Before we met I'd never known what it was like to be loved unconditionally."

Bal, as she likes to be known, was 17 when her father announced that she was going to be married to a family friend she had met only once before. She then spent eight years trapped in an oppressive, loveless marriage. "I had always expected to have an arranged marriage, but I did not expect a forced marriage," she says. "I told my father that I didn't want to marry him. He just said, 'You'd better get used to the idea. If you run away I will find you'."

Now aged 39, Bal considers herself lucky. She escaped, but in doing so has been disowned by her family.

Born in the Indian Punjab to a Sikh family, Bal came to England at the age of one with her parents, who settled in Darlington.

"Growing up in Darlington was a schizophrenic existence," she recalls. "The house was India. Shoes and Western clothes were forbidden. So was English. But at school I was free. I ran around and made friends with whoever I wanted. I could actually be myself."

But by the time she reached puberty Bal's attendance at school had dropped from 100 per cent to 50. "I remember my father telling me: 'There's no need for an education where you're going'. But to my knowledge no one ever bothered to find out why I stopped turning up."

Bal believes school should have more of a role in looking for the signs of exclusion. She also believes that marriage registrars should be on the lookout for people who appear to be marrying against their will. Shortly after the marriage Bal was taken to her in-laws' home in Huddersfield where she slept with her ex-husband for the first time. "I was given a glass of milk to drink by a female member of his family. They said it would help me sleep.I was 17 and had never even kissed a boy before. I felt humiliated and degraded. I couldn't believe that my own parents had forced me into this utterly miserable situation."

The concept of honour had been so drummed into her that there were times Bal thought the only honourable escape was suicide.

She said: "I thought killing myself would be the one way I could end it all without dishonouring the family." Instead, she decided to try for a child, someone whom she hoped would love her back as much as she needed to be loved.

But the stress was too much and she miscarried three times. It was then that Bal decided she could take no more. She began interviewing for jobs in the London area and secretly organised a flat to flee to. She also began removing any bits of paper from the house that could later be used to track her down.

"The day of my Great Escape – 28 March 1996 – was the day my life began again," she says.

Five years and two diplomas later she met Phil in a pub and they married soon afterwards. "Invites went out to my family but they never showed up," says Bal. "That was when I knew I had to let go."

This article was found at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/forced-marriages-the-trail-of-misery-and-fear-in-
britain-942820.html

Coalition wants polygamy 'Safety Net' for Texas

Deseret News - September 25, 2008

by Ben Winslow

DALLAS — It's never too late to learn.

Members of Utah's polygamous communities are here to speak to social workers, Child Protective Services caseworkers and law enforcement about the plural life and how to interact with fundamentalists — perhaps averting another raid.

Members of the pro-polygamy group Principle Voices and Utah's Safety Net Committee are presenting a pair of workshops today on polygamous culture to hundreds of people at the Texas Council on Family Violence's annual conference.

"Utah's made all the same mistakes," said Pat Merkeley, a social worker and the newly appointed coordinator for the Safety Net Committee, a coalition of polygamists, government and social service agencies from Utah and Arizona.

"Hopefully, we are building on the mistakes of our past."

The April raid on the Fundamentalist LDS Church's YFZ Ranch in Eldorado exposed a lack of knowledge about polygamists, at least among social service workers in Texas.

"We didn't have adequate knowledge to be able to effectively serve a plural family community," said Gloria Terry, the president of the Texas Council on Family Violence. "We didn't understand how we could best serve individuals in that community, because it is so different from the families that we typically serve that are in crisis."

In Utah, polygamy has a long and storied history. It is that history that Principle Voices' Anne Wilde is speaking about, focusing on the raids in Utah and Arizona in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

"The result was those people did not give up their lifestyle or their religious belief in plural marriage," she said. "If anything, it made them more determined, more loyal to their beliefs than anything."

It also created closed societies, making it harder for victims to reach out and advocates to get in to help.

"Naturally, we don't want there to be victims and we are there to help them as well — if there really are," Wilde said. "But I don't think you go into a whole community and do what they did with that raid in Texas in an effort to help the victims."

More than a hundred children remain under CPS jurisdiction as the abuse investigation moves forward. A series of criminal indictments have been handed down against FLDS members charging them with sexual assault, bigamy and failure to report child abuse.

Today's workshops are designed to give social workers and other professionals information as they go forward with the FLDS custody case, Terry said.

"In Texas, we are the system that supports the programs that provide services to families in crisis," Terry said. "I can't pass judgment on what did or did not happen by either side. We knew there were people who were negatively affected. How do we assist them?"

Merkeley is proposing that Texas consider creating its own "Safety Net."

"We're hoping that it will be a model for other states," she said.

Created by the Utah and Arizona attorneys general, the Safety Net Committee brings representatives from polygamous communities to the same table as government, while offering help to abuse victims in the often-isolated communities. As of January, the Utah Attorney General's Office estimated 1,300 people had been offered some kind of assistance through the Safety Net.

Since the YFZ raid, domestic violence coalitions in Utah, Arizona and Texas have been in regular contact with each other. Terry had praise for the Safety Net, which provides a host of resources for victims of abuse leaving a closed society.

"It seems like Utah and Arizona have figured out ways to truly connect their systems around this issue. Unfortunately, in Texas I don't think we've done that yet," Terry said. "Everybody's working hard, trying to do the right thing."

This article was found at:

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700261526,00.html

Anti-polygamy activist pens book on FLDS

Deseret News - August 1, 2008

by Ben Winslow

An anti-polygamy activist who has been a lightning rod of controversy when it comes to the Fundamentalist LDS Church will publish her autobiography next year.

Flora Jessop's "Church of Lies: The True Story of Escaping Slavery and Polygamy, and Rescuing Women and Children from the Notorious Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints" will hit bookstore shelves in February 2009. It's being published by Jossey-Bass, a division of Wiley Publishing.

"It's a book about my life, about what I come from and why I do what I do," Jessop told the Deseret News on Thursday. "I think that it's important to know why I do what I do, and for people to know why I'm fighting for these children."

In the book's preface, Jessop said she was one of 28 children born to her father and his three wives. At 8, she said she began being sexually abused and tried to run away throughout her teenage years. She finally left the church about 20 years ago, enduring a rough life until she became an advocate for abused children in polygamy.

Jessop now heads the Phoenix-based Child Protection Project, where she has helped women and children seeking to leave the FLDS communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. She once proclaimed she'd be willing to go to jail for harboring runaways, if it meant protecting children from abuse.

A fixture on cable-TV shows, Jessop has been highly critical of the FLDS Church, but she also targets government agencies — particularly child protective services — which she has accused of doing nothing about abuse within polygamy.

"We're proud to be publishing Flora Jessop's incredible story, because this brave and articulate lady not only escaped from the sexual abuse and slavery of Warren Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, but she's been the only woman to go back time after time in the dark of the night, at great personal risk, to rescue women and children from this dangerous and notorious sect," publisher Paul Foster said in an e-mail.

Jessop's former faith, and even members of her own family, have accused her of repeatedly lying.

"The stories she tells have no credence and are fabricated," Martha Barlow Jessop, Flora's former guardian, wrote on the FLDS Web site truthwillprevail.org, questioning many of her claims.

"I forgive her, but her lies and deceit should not be allowed to continue on as fact. Her experiences have nothing to do with our religion or way of life. Her story is not typical and should not be used as a template to judge others."

Jessop ignores the criticism, accusing the group of attacking victims who speak out.

"I want people to understand that we don't do this because we hate them," she said. "You don't fight for somebody that you hate. We don't fight the people. We fight the practice of abuse that's inherent."

Jessop has been intertwined with the FLDS Church's YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas. In 2004, she exposed the property as an FLDS compound. Members of the polygamous sect had originally told Texas officials it was a "corporate hunting retreat." Leading up to and during the raid on the compound earlier this year, Jessop fielded phone calls from someone claiming to be a pregnant, abused girl who wanted to flee. Jessop cooperated with law enforcement, who declared Rozita Swinton, 33, a "person of interest" in the hoax call that prompted the raid. Hundreds of children were taken from the YFZ Ranch and ultimately returned to their parents after a pair of Texas court rulings. A grand jury in Eldorado has indicted six men, including FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, on abuse-related charges

This article was found at:

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700247461,00.html

Senate hearing: "Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response."

Las Vegas Review-Journal July 24, 2008

Senator Reid presents bill aimed at polygamy

By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid on Wednesday introduced a bill in Congress to crack down on polygamous groups, charging that crime is organized and "rampant" within the communities.

Reid's first stop today to promote the bill will be at a hearing that he largely organized with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The measure calls for formation of a federal task force to combat "the unique set of crimes committed by polygamist organizations."

It also would make available $2 million in federal grants for local authorities to investigate and prosecute crimes linked to polygamy. Another $12 million over five years would be offered to organizations that provide protection and services to family members seeking to escape plural marriages.

Former members of polygamous groups have charged domestic and sexual abuse is common through forced marriages and unions involving underage girls, along with other crimes such as welfare fraud, tax evasion, extortion and kidnapping.

Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, has equated activities of polygamist groups with organized crime and has been pressing for federal racketeering investigations of their activities.

The Senate hearing is expected to focus on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect whose adherents believe plural marriage is ordained by God. The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy in 1904.

FLDS membership is based in communities on the border of Utah and Arizona, while members also live in Nevada and other Western states. Its membership is estimated to be between 6,000 and 10,000.

State and local authorities have pursued criminal allegations against FLDS leaders and members, while Reid has argued a stronger federal hand is necessary.

FLDS leader Warren Jeffs was convicted in Utah last year of two counts of being an accomplice to rape, for his role in arranging a 2002 marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old first cousin.

Jeffs faces similar charges in Arizona and this week was indicted by a grand jury in Texas on sexual assault charges.

"We are taking aim at the blatant and systemic crime that is rampant within these polygamist groups," Reid said in a statement accompanying his bill.

Reid, one of 16 Mormons serving in Congress, did not consult with the church in forming his bill, according to his spokesman Jon Summers.

The Mormon church has not taken a position on the bill, spokeswoman Kim Farah said. In an e-mail, she said "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has repeatedly expressed concern about the illegal practice of polygamy and persistent reports of the possible emotional and physical abuse of women and children."

Today's hearing is entitled "Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response."

Chief federal prosecutors from Nevada and Utah are scheduled to testify along with attorneys general from Arizona and Texas. Also listed to testify are former FLDS member Carolyn Jessup, and Stephen Singular, who has written about the FLDS and Jeffs.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that FLDS spokesman Rod Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney, sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a letter protesting that no members of the group were invited to testify.

"History is replete with examples of misinformation becoming the foundation of persecution and hysteria, leading in turn to real harm to real people," Parker wrote, according to the newspaper.

Parker could not be reached by telephone message or e-mail on Wednesday.

Asked why there were no FLDS witnesses invited, Summers said the committee did not need to hear from them.

"This is not a trial," Summers said. "This is a hearing about ways to increase enforcement against crimes committed by these groups. Are they going to come in and say this is the best way to bust us?"

This article was found at:

http://www.lvrj.com/
news/25845989.html

Sen. Harry Reid to introduce bill to aid victims of polygamy-related crime

Las Vegas Review-Journal - July 22, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid is preparing to introduce a bill to combat polygamy-related crimes while offering federal grants to social service programs that help former members of polygamous sects, a spokesman said this morning.

The "Victims of Polygamy Assistance Act of 2008" will be introduced on Wednesday, the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on polygamy, spokesman Jon Summers said.

Reid and Gregory Brower, U.S. attorney for Nevada, are among the scheduled witnesses for Thursday's hearing, along with attorneys general from Arizona and Texas, and Brett Tolman, the U.S. attorney from Utah.

Reid has compared polygamous groups such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to organized crime syndicates, and has called on the federal government to address them as such.

The new legislation would codify Reid's call for a federal task force to focus on abuse, extortion, embezzlement and other activities that have been associated with polygamous group.

It would offer grants to state and local law enforcement agencies, and also to groups that provide witness protection, housing, child care, mental health services and other care to former sect members.

Reid's office did not indicate the cost of the bill.

This article was found at:

http://www.lvrj.com/breaking_news/25757379.html

Austin lawyer pushes Baptist churches to confront sexual abuse

American-Statesman June 9, 2008

by Eileen E. Flynn

On the Web site she designed to help victims of clergy sexual abuse, Christa Brown keeps a time line of her efforts to confront Baptist church leaders with her claim that she was molested by a youth minister in North Texas four decades ago.
Every few paragraphs, an icon of a hurdle appears in the text to symbolize the setbacks the Austin lawyer, 56, says she has encountered: wrangling with church lawyers, dealing with systemic blindness and finding aggressive resistance to change.
Despite her shy, private nature, Brown has become the public face of victims of abuse who hope to force the Baptist church to acknowledge their allegations and take concrete action to identify and sanction abusers.
As the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination, prepares for its annual meeting this week in Indianapolis, the issue that Brown has championed will be aired more openly than it has in past meetings.
Brown's Web site, Stop Baptist Predators, features a blog and updates on Baptist sexual abuse cases and the group's efforts to change church policies. She has traveled the country to speak to victims and distribute information at Baptist gatherings. And she does outreach to Baptists through the Catholic-founded Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, the country's largest clergy abuse support group.
David Clohessy, executive director of Survivors Network, describes Brown as a trailblazer for Baptist sexual abuse victims. Clohessy, who fought for years to get the Catholic Church to acknowledge what he and others suffered at the hands of priests, says he is astounded by the resistance that Brown has encountered.
"I just think it's so easy to succumb to fatalism and bitterness," he said, "and yet (she) just keeps chugging ahead with remarkably upbeat determination."
Debbie Vasquez of Lewisville said she hadn't found the courage to report her own story of abuse until she saw Brown interviewed on TV in 2006 and learned that Survivors Network helped Baptist victims. "Christa just encouraged me to talk and to tell," Vasquez said.
Brown says she has heard from dozens of other victims.
Last year at the Southern Baptist Convention's meeting in San Antonio, the Rev. Wade Burleson, an Oklahoma pastor, proposed that the denomination consider creating a database of credibly accused, admitted and convicted sexual abusers. Leaders have explored the idea and are expected to report their findings to about 9,500 clergy members and lay people at the meetings.
And the national convention magazine this month features an eight-page report titled Protecting Our Children that acknowledges the problem of clergy abuse and details how churches can conduct background checks and report allegations of abuse.
But Brown said she isn't getting her hopes up.
She has already pushed for a similar database, as well as a central reporting point for victims, that would be kept by the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the country's largest state convention, with 5,500 churches.
Emily Prevost, a state convention official, said those goals are unlikely to be met because Baptists value their autonomy so much that they would not support creating a central authority to handle abuse cases.
"They believe so strongly that the local church is the center of authority that to make that decision would be to give up something they believe so strongly in," she said.
Burleson counters that a database has no authority — it's simply information — so it wouldn't threaten the autonomy of local churches. And Brown says she knows how slowly the wheels can turn in a denomination that does not look to a central authority for rules the way the Catholic Church does.
"The buck stops nowhere," she said. "There is no one person who will take responsibility."
Brown says she was a goody-two-shoes and a "book nerd" as a teenager in the 1960s, when she says she was abused by Tommy Gilmore, the youth and education minister at First Baptist Church in Farmers Branch, where her family worshipped. Brown was 16 at the time, legally a minor.
Brown said Gilmore convinced her that sexual intimacy with him was a sign of great faith, a blessing from God and something so special that it must be kept secret from her family, according to a lawsuit that Brown filed in 2005.
"Good Baptist girls are raised to be submissive," she said.
Later, when Brown confided in another minister at the church, the lawsuit says, Gilmore made her kneel in front of him for 30 minutes while he prayed to cleanse Satan from her and then forced Brown to tell his wife that their relationship was Brown's fault.
Reached by phone in Florida on Friday, Gilmore, who now works in real estate, said his lawyer had advised him not to comment.
For decades, Brown said, she didn't tell anyone else what had happened.
But in 2003, as Brown watched her daughter approach the age she was when the abuse started, she began to think of her painful past.
At the time, she was meeting her friend Elana Einhorn for weekly walks around Lady Bird Lake. The two met at the Texas Supreme Court in 1989 when Brown was a staff attorney and Einhorn was a law clerk. In 2004, Brown confided her secret.
Einhorn said she stopped dead in the middle of the trail while Brown spilled the details of her abuse and her plan to confront the church.
The two lawyers, almost reflexively, began analyzing the situation in legal terms: criminal statutes and civil lawsuits.
Brown said she approached national and state Baptist officials. She said officials there told her to talk to the church. Church leaders told her that it wasn't their problem because Gilmore no longer worked there. And the Southern Baptist Convention said it had no record that Gilmore was still in ministry.
Shortly thereafter, she heard from a lawyer who represented both the church and the state convention. In a letter, the lawyer suggested that Brown may have misremembered details and warned that if she pursued the matter, she could face legal recourse.
After searching in four states, Brown said she finally tracked Gilmore down in Florida. He was still in ministry.
In 2005, Brown filed separate lawsuits against Gilmore and First Baptist Church. She had previously filed a criminal complaint against Gilmore, but the statute of limitations had expired.
She eventually settled with the church, receiving an apology letter and a sum that she isn't allowed to disclose, but she said it didn't cover the cost of her therapy. Gilmore fought the civil lawsuit, and Brown said she eventually dropped it because of the stress and expense.
Brown said her main objective with the lawsuit was to confront a church environment that appeared to allow abuse.
"I realized that if (church leaders) had done this to me and had worked so hard to silence me that they had undoubtedly done this to countless others," Brown said. "If you silence the victims, the perpetrators stay in their pulpits, and kids are not safe. And that's the reality I could not live with and still can't."
Einhorn says other people who claim sexual abuse are lucky to have a woman like Brown on their side. "She would say, 'If I could save one more kid from being harmed by putting myself out there.'

"I would tell her, 'You've done enough; you can put it aside for a little while,' " Einhorn said. "And she can't yet."
Brown says she receives support from her husband and adult daughter and has the financial means to make advocacy for victims a full-time job. She knows that others in her position aren't so lucky.
"I have been so fortunate," Brown said. "I think that kind of grace carries obligation."
This article was found at:
http://www.statesman.com/
news/content/news/stories/
local/06/09/0609brown.html

State officials faced culture of lies, religious experts say

The Dallas Morning News - May 25, 2008

By EMILY RAMSHAW and ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Child welfare officials were up against a culture of secrecy, unlimited resources and sect members well-schooled in the art of misleading authorities as they tried to build their case for removing hundreds of children from a West Texas polygamist enclave, religious experts and former adherents say.

Thursday's appeals court decision that many if not all of the children removed from the Yearning For Zion ranch last month must be returned to their parents highlights how difficult it is to build a child welfare case against a fundamentalist religious group, sect investigators say – particularly without a vocal victim.

The 450 children remain in state custody while the Texas Supreme Court decides whether to take up the case. But the legal challenge has kindled quiet debate over whether Texas authorities should deal with polygamist groups as states such as Utah and Arizona have done: trying to win cooperation rather than raiding communities and prosecuting members en masse.

"These are people who have been taught from the cradle that outsiders are bad, that government is evil, until they fear us more than they fear their abusers," said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

Added Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard: "Step by step, we've tried to make sure that people ... understood what the rules were, understood what we were going to prosecute and that we weren't going to condemn them just for their lifestyle."

'No reliable evidence'

Leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints vehemently deny misleading state officials. Lying is not part of their culture, they say – privacy is.

"The record's clearly going to show what the deceptions were and who lied to whom," said sect leader Willie Jessop, referring to state investigators.

CPS officials, citing the ongoing legal battle, declined to discuss specifics of the case. But in a filing to the Texas Supreme Court on Friday, lawyers for Texas' Department of Family and Protective Services said collecting evidence was extraordinarily difficult. Girls routinely switched their names and identified themselves as mothers of other women's children. Some didn't even come forward to claim their own kin.

"Based on both the children's and women's repeated deceptions, lies, and misinformation, the trial court had no reliable evidence" on the identities of the children or their parents, the state's attorneys wrote. The appellate court's ruling last week centered on a general lack of evidence.

For her, lying was duty

This comes as no surprise to Mary Mackert, a former FLDS member who, as a child in a polygamous family, was taught that her behavior could determine whether her father ended up in jail. She is in Texas because of her interest in the children.

Her mother rehearsed lies with her children: When her father spent the night at his other wives' houses? "Daddy's a traveling salesman." Why didn't the family attend the mainstream Mormon church? "Daddy's a Catholic."

By the time Ms. Mackert, from Utah, was married herself – at 17, to a 50-year-old – lying was second nature. When her husband was in public with her, he would ask their children to "come to Grandpa." When Ms. Mackert took the rent check to the landlord, she referred to her husband as her father.

"You didn't think of it as lying. It's your duty and your responsibility to protect those who are living the principle," Ms. Mackert said. "They're going to lie to protect their prophet, and the head of their family. They'll do anything under the banner of religion."

That includes draining their resources, said Sam Brower, a Utah-based polygamist investigator and expert on the FLDS sect.

Mr. Brower said that the sect's legal strategy is simply to outlast opponents – and that it has the money to do it, thanks to various successful businesses the church owns. He said the sect has brought in virtually every high-powered attorney it's ever used to tackle the West Texas case.

Religious leaders also make investigators' work harder by shuttling people across state lines, Mr. Brower said. Often, he said, people of interest simply "disappear" – making something as simple as serving a subpoena incredibly costly. When investigators get too close, Mr. Brower said, sect leaders order entire families to turn in their photo albums, birth certificates and other records to be hidden or destroyed.

"It's like dealing with the mob, only worse," Mr. Brower said. "Part of their culture is to create confusion."

The wrong approach?

Mr. Jessop called such statements "outrageous and barbaric." He said investigators have never cared to hear sect members' side of the story – relying on rumors and former adherents with agendas to guide them.

"There has been such a blatant disregard for the truth," he said. "Everything's about sensation. There have been no boundaries."

For many sect members, the Yearning For Zion case brings up painful memories of the 1953 raids on Short Creek – a now-renamed town on the Utah-Arizona border where more than 300 FLDS women and children were sent into foster care.

They hope the West Texas case will play out like Short Creek did: After a public backlash that brought down an Arizona governor, families were eventually reunited.

If it does, experts say, Texas officials can learn from Utah and Arizona, where officials have emphasized selective prosecution for child and domestic abuse, not targeting polygamy itself or going after entire communities.

The two states created a safety committee made up of sect members, social workers and law enforcement officials, with monthly meetings that rotate among cities with significant polygamist populations.

Mr. Goddard, the Arizona attorney general, said authorities in both states have worked closely since 2003, creating a hotline for abused youths to call and preventing FLDS leader Warren Jeffs from using the sect's trust fund and local police and government jobs "to coerce" followers to toe the line.

"In the past, we were afraid to seek help and to go to the police because we were afraid that they would charge us," said Heidi Foster, a Salt Lake City mother of 12 who has been in a polygamous marriage and now helps run a support group for fundamentalist Mormon women.

Texas' approach drives sect women "further underground," she said. "They're going to be more likely to try and handle it themselves and not seek help."

Imminent danger cited

Texas officials have portrayed their case as simply too urgent. The sect's pervasive belief in marrying off underage girls put every child there in imminent danger, they argued. A trial judge agreed, but the appellate court did not.

Mr. Jessop said if sect members are ever allowed to return to the ranch, it would be a long time until they trust the government.

While some kind of "cooperative" community policing model might work, he doesn't foresee sect members changing their lifestyle.

"The belief of the people is that religion is not the problem, bias against religion is the problem," Mr. Jessop said. "It's a little bit like asking a Christian to give up Christianity to get their children back."

This article was found at:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/
dws/news/nation/stories/DN-polygamists_
25tex.ART.State.Edition2.467ff56.html

Texas sect kicked out its boys as teens

The Arizona Republic - McClatchy Newspapers
April 20, 2008

FORT WORTH, Texas - Forced marriages. Underage sex. Teenage mothers.
That is the portrait emerging of the hundreds of girls who have been removed by the state from a polygamist sect's compound in West Texas that is at the center of one of the largest child welfare investigations in American history.
But what about the boys who are among the 416 children taken from the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch?

There are believed to be far more girls than boys among the children in custody. And the Texas boys are thought to have escaped the hardships common in other Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints communities, where boys are routinely expelled.
On Friday, during a chaotic child custody hearing, a lawyer for the children said two dozen boys had been taken from the FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas.
State child welfare officials disputed that number, saying the population of boys was "substantially higher," without giving an exact figure.
"We don't have a solid breakdown on that right now. . . . I'm sure we have estimates, but I don't have anything reliable," said Greg Cunningham, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
Observers say the boys at the West Texas compound are believed to be favorites of Warren Jeffs, the so-called prophet of the FLDS even as he serves time in prison for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.
But in the sect's much older communities near Salt Lake City and in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., welfare workers have long known about boys separated from their families, put out on the streets and considered "dead" by their loved ones after drawing the ire of church leaders.
"Many of these boys come from good families. But their fathers know that if they don't put their child out on the street, his entire family will be put out on the street," said Shannon Price, director of the Diversity Foundation in Salt Lake City that helps victims abused by the sect.
The FLDS has traditionally kept the number of boys in their communities low. That way the male leaders can have their pick of young "plural wives," without the worry of younger competition, said Brenda Jensen, a former "polygamy kid" who now works as a volunteer for The Hope Organization. It is a nonprofit group in St. George, Utah, that helps abuse victims from polygamous relationships.
The FLDS has long been headquartered in the twin towns of Colorado City and Hildale, where most of its estimated 10,000 members live, and began building the YFZ Ranch in 2004. It split from the mainstream Mormon Church in 1890 when the latter rejected polygamy.
FLDS leaders, under the direction of Jeffs, can be ruthless in the ways they kick boys out of their communities in Arizona and Utah, Jensen said, stressing that she was expressing her own feelings as a child of polygamists, and not the views of The Hope Organization.
Boys as young as 13 have been torn from their families and left on the unfamiliar streets of Salt Lake City and Las Vegas for committing such infractions as talking to a girl, or rolling up their sleeves - a no-no for showing skin in public, Jensen said.
The boys are ill-equipped to deal with their new world.
"You might as well put them on another planet. No training. No food. No idea on how to get help or what to do," Jensen said. "Some are so heartsick they can't do anything."
There may be as many as 2,000 of the young castaways, known as the "Lost Boys" by the people who try to help integrate them into a world they have been taught to distrust.
Sam Brower, a private investigator in Cedar City, Utah, who has tracked the plight of Lost Boys, said many "have just been discarded on the side of the highway. . . . Many have turned to drugs and alcohol and end up on the streets of Vegas.
"They know absolutely nothing about the outside world. They have little education. . . . It's very rough for them."
Jensen said the boys in the FLDS, after graduating from home school, win favors from "the priesthood" by going on two-year "work missions" away from their families. They work for free for the church but are still vulnerable to expulsion if they slip up.
With the boys gone, the girls, fresh from graduating, are married off to "these old grizzly men," Jensen said.
"Usually, your graduation dress becomes your wedding dress," she added. "Those were the lucky ones. Some would just get tapped on the shoulder, pulled into a room and come out married."
This article was found at:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/04/20/
20080420polygamist-ON.html

Ex-sect members escape polygamy but not pain

CNN - April 17, 2008

By Eliott C. McLaughlin

(CNN) -- Long after she escaped a polygamist Colorado City, Arizona, community in 1986, Flora Jessop found another way to escape: cocaine.
"It killed the pain. It killed the hurt," she said. "I didn't have to hurt so bad because I missed everything I knew."
Once she fled the fundamentalist Mormon sect, she was an apostate. She believed God hated her. Her parents and siblings thought she was wicked. Worst of all, she knew she was damned to hell, Jessop said.
Jessop, then 17, began hitchhiking across the country, almost killed herself with cocaine, worked as a topless dancer and eventually became pregnant, she said.
Fearing that church members would hunt her down, she looked over her shoulder for five years, she said. She occasionally drank alcohol -- she liked tequila best -- but preferred to use cocaine because it kept her alert.
"When you're running for your life, you can't afford to get to the point you cannot run," she said. Watch Jessop explain how running was an education »
It was a need to protect her daughter that finally convinced her there was more to life, she said.
Today, Jessop, 38, escapes by freeing others trapped unwillingly in polygamist sects: 84 to date. She finds particular solace in rescuing women and children, some of whom are child brides like she was. It was a marriage to her first cousin Philip that prompted Jessop to run.
Her story strikes a common theme among those who have left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a Mormon offshoot that disavowed the mainstream church in 1890 when it abandoned polygamy as a pathway to the highest level of heaven.
The FLDS has strict rules, especially for girls: no pants, haircuts, drugs, booze or boys; just "keep sweet" and obey. So young women who leave often delve into worldly pleasures once outside, indulgences as innocent as blue jeans and as destructive as heroin and prostitution, survivors and an expert say.
Jenny Larson experienced such urges in 1946, when her mother, Berna, left a polygamist household in Glendale, Utah, with seven of her nine children. In those days, however, rebellion bore a different hue.
Larson, 73, recalls how "you wouldn't have caught me wearing a long-sleeve blouse" after leaving Glendale.
"I think I was one of the first girls in the seventh grade to wear lipstick. I put henna in my hair to make it red. I wasn't going to look like a little 'polyg' kid," she said, using the slang "polyg" with all the contempt of a racial slur.
Larson -- who goes by Aunt Jenny to the dozens of girls she's helped escape and who wrote the book "Brainwash to Hogwash: Escaping and Exposing Polygamy" -- concedes it's rare that young women can shed the sect's psychological shackles.
So how did she know polygamy wasn't for her? Larson recalls seeing her father, Vergel, smack her mother for expressing jealousy over his second wife, Mae. Watch an ex-sect member say she's now free »
"There was no way in hell I was going to live that way," Larson said.
And Larson quipped of the men hounding her for her hand in marriage when she was 11: "Some of them were so ugly I wondered how they could have sex without putting a sack over their head, but I'm being mean."
Larson's and Jessop's escapes are not typical. Many women don't want to leave, ex-sect members and an expert said.
The purportedly rescued women often return to polygamy. An example is the 1953 raid at Short Creek (now Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City), where dozens of women and more than 260 children were placed in state custody.
Three of the then-children taken in the raid recently said that they eventually returned to polygamist lifestyles, including Fawneta Caroll, who was 7 when she was taken from her family. She remembers clearly what she felt 55 years ago, and it wasn't relief, she said.
"We knew that the object was to take us away, adopt us out and we would never be back to our homes," she said.
Religion -- the reason these women say they stay -- is also used to validate the brainwashing and, in some cases, physical abuse employed to keep women and children submissive, said Marci Hamilton, author of "Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children."
The women are wholly dependent on the patriarchal community, Hamilton said. They often lack education and marketable skills, and they're told of "terrible forces outside the compound," namely evil people who wish them harm, she said.
And there's always the prospect of eternal damnation, said Hamilton, a professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law who has studied polygamist sects for 10 years.
"It's not only physically dangerous to leave, you're also risking your soul," she said. "Staying in the compound, even though they're being abused, may look like a smarter choice to a lot of these people."
Joni Holm has taken care of four children who escaped Colorado City, and she concurs that youngsters who leave the community have trouble shaking their indoctrination.
"You literally have to take them, deprogram them and reintroduce them to society," she said.
Flora Jessop brought Fawn Holm, 16, and Fawn Broadbent, 17, to Joni Holm's Sandy, Utah, home in 2004. Watch Jessop talk about life in a sect »
Fawn Holm, Joni's sister-in-law, feared that she was about to be married to now-imprisoned FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs, who is serving time in Utah for being an accomplice to rape. Broadbent's name had just been placed in the church's "Joy Book," meaning she could be married off any day, and probably without warning.
The "two Fawns" were smart, Joni Holm said, but had elementary school education levels. They had bizarre mannerisms and wouldn't look people in the eye. They would sometimes jump off elevators because "they were taught they could never be alone with a man," she said.
Fawn Holm began using drugs and alcohol, and Broadbent dabbled in drinking, Joni Holm said.
It's a common phenomenon, Larson said. "When you're held down and can't have any freedoms, they go the opposite way when they get out: drinking, drugs, sex. They're going to hell anyway; they just jump headfirst in."
Joni and husband Carl's greatest challenge, however, was teaching the teens to trust. So entrenched was their distrust of "outsiders" that they needed even the simplest things proved to them, especially examples of how the FLDS "twisted" the Book of Mormon, said Joni Holm, a mainstream Mormon.
"You have to show them factual stuff, because this is what their dad has taught them all their lives," she said.
When Texas authorities seized 416 children from the FLDS Yearning for Zion compound in Eldorado this month, there were similar signs of indoctrination, said Helen Pfluger, whose Baptist church in nearby San Angelo volunteered to help feed and clothe the children and their mothers.
"They were very quiet and didn't want to look us in the eye," she said. "We never knew for sure which child belonged to which mother. It was very communal."
They refused to play board games. Clothes had to be cotton and plain, no patterns and no red, "the color of the devil," Pfluger said. The children shunned processed food, white bread and sodas, and essentially subsisted on yogurt, fruit and lots of almonds, she said.
"Another San Angelo church had brought some coloring pages and crayons," she said. "They didn't know what to do with them, and their mothers didn't either."
Learning to color will be one of many challenges the children will face if they're permanently removed from YFZ ranch.
Joni Holm said it takes five to 10 years for a sect child to learn how to live a life society would deem "normal." Larson said it could take longer. Jessop said she might never be normal.
But Jessop said she would rather wage the battles she faces on "the outside" than live a life of submission and abuse. She reckons many FLDS children would feel the same way if given a choice, she said.
It was difficult to give up the life she was taught was her only path to salvation. But she had to do it to get away from a culture that she felt was backward and malevolent, she said.
"The pain got so bad in heaven that I was willing to damn myself to hell to escape it," she said.

This article was found at:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/16/
polygamy.escapes/

Children of Polygamy: Life Outside the Compound

ABC News - April 8, 2008

Kids Raised On a Polygamist Compound Often Have Phobias, Experts Say

By EMILY FRIEDMAN

For the 401 children removed from a West Texas polygamist compound earlier this week, life as they know it where even laughter was forbidden is about to change drastically.

Now the victims of what state authorities suspect is the largest child abuse case in the nation's history, these children are likely to face a myriad of psychological issues, including extreme phobias, identity issues and problems obeying authority figures, according to several cult experts.

"On one level [the lives of these children] have been wonderful in the sense that you're never alone and you have lots of family members constantly around you," said Steven Hassan, psychologist and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center. "But on the other hand, you're not encouraged to think for yourself or have an imagination and learn and grow. You're encouraged to conform and be a clone."

The children and the 133 women taken from the compound once led by Warren Jeffs, who sits in prison after being convicted as an accomplice to rape, are being held in a nearby shelter. Texas authorities interviewing them are eager for any details about what life was like within the heavily restricted community.

Photographs of the children show some as young as infants and others ranging in age up to teenagers, many having spent their entire lives immersed in the cult.

That means having grown up on a compound where the rules of childhood forbid the joys of normal child's play like television and radio. Internet access was forbidden and iPods could only be used to listen to Jeffs' sermons. Even laughter was banned at the compound.

These children are unlikely to respond well to the Texan authorities and will have a long road to recovery ahead of them.

"They're going to need to realize that the world is a nice place and that they can sit in the sun and play on swings and that people will be kind to them and like them," said Hassan, who is a former member of Sun Myung Moon's cult. "And that women, particularly for members of this cult, matter and are not just baby machines."
Cult Life Gives Children Irrational Fears, Experts Say

While other American children worry little about things more serious than their lunchtime snack or their afternoon play date, the children removed from Jeffs' compound will likely suffer from terrifying phobias, Hassan told ABCNews.com.

"In the mind of someone who has a phobia, they can't imagine [living outside the compound] will have a positive result," said Hassan. "They'll develop phobias of losing their salvation or burning in hell."

"It can also be things like [fearing] they'll be raped by the outsiders, or that the outsiders will beat and torture you or that you'll get cancer or AIDS if you leave the compound," said Hassan. "Some believe they'll become drug addicts or will commit suicide if they leave."

Releasing these phobias is key to recovery for cult members, but often proves difficult, even for those members relieved to be outside the compound's walls, Hassan said.

"Beliefs are very, very powerful," said Hassan, who added that he himself felt very confused and brainwashed after his time in the Moon organization. "So what's really successful in helping people come out of cults is to meet former members who have their lives together and who are happy. That, in a sense, is a phobia cure."

"[These children] are like people who have come from one culture into another, in some ways they're similar to immigrants," said Allen Tate Wood, another former member of Moon's cult and now a public educator about cults. "Now they're faced with a whole myriad of challenges to come to terms with in the larger world."

While the Texas authorities hope to learn about the compound from the women and children, these individuals will likely take offense at authorities who, according to their religious doctrine, have not be authorized by God, said Wood.

"The ideology of the theology of the group is that their boss is ordained by God," said Wood. "Initially it's going to be very difficult for them to trust people."
Like Addiction, Indoctrination Recovery is Long

"Inside extremist organizations the addiction is deliberately induced," said Wood, who said the effect a cult has on an individual is similar to that of a drug or alcohol addiction. "When someone comes out, part of the process of healing and recovering is letting go of the addiction, and this case that means letting go of the theology, ideology of the group."

"As long as they still believe, they're still addicted," added Wood.

And while both Hassan and Wood told ABCNews.com they've seen children born into cults live highly functional lives, many others do not.

Unfortunately, much as drug addicts suffer with symptoms of withdrawal and battle temptation, so do former cult members.

"People have flashbacks and sort of a depersonalization where the individual loses all sense of identity," said Wood. "They don't know how to make a decision because they've always referred it to a leader before."

"People often do go back," said Wood. "Some come all the way out and then they just fall back into them they don't find the way to survive as free agents."


This article was found at:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/
story?id=4611969&page=1

Funding approved for polygamous 'Safety Net'

Deseret Morning News - March 4, 2008

by Ben Winslow


State lawmakers have approved more than $300,000 to fund support services for people grappling with abuse and neglect in polygamous communities.

The House on Monday unanimously passed SB239, a funding package to create the Safety Net Initiative within the Utah Attorney General's Office.

"This is a population that is unique only to Utah and nobody has addressed making sure people within those communities are safe and they have access and they have the same rights and abilities as other citizens within the state," said Paul Murphy, the Utah Attorney General's Safety Net coordinator.

The bill's language was broadened to include providing services to people in "underserved" and "culturally isolated" communities in Utah and northern Arizona — not exclusively polygamy.

"I think people look at this and don't see this is crime prevention and community building," Murphy said. "It fits with the goals of the attorney general's office. We want communities to be healthy and people to be safe and know that help is available."

The attorney general's office has been pushing for the funding since a $700,000 federal grant was cut that paid for emergency housing, a case manager and other necessities to help women and children dealing with abuse and neglect in closed societies. With that money gone, many social service agencies had to scale back their efforts.

Authorities have estimated that the Safety Net has helped as many as 1,300 people in polygamous communities. With much of the resources in southern Utah, the Fundamentalist LDS Church appears to have been the principal target of outreach efforts.

The Utah Attorney General's Safety Net committee came about after a 2003 town hall meeting in St. George about "the polygamy problem." Victim advocates, representatives from polygamous communities and bureaucrats have forged an alliance to provide services to those in need.

http://deseretnews.com/article/
1,5143,695258654,00.html

FLDS 'Lost Boys' home seeks funding

Deseret Morning News - January 26, 2008

by Ben Winslow


"Smith" said he was abandoned on a street in Hurricane after going to see a movie.

The 18-year-old from the Fundamentalist LDS enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., was left there when his father found out that he was there.

"He doesn't want me watching movies, I guess," said Smith, who asked the Deseret Morning News not to use his name. "I decided to move away because it wasn't worth it. It's been going on for 10 years."

The young man has been out of the polygamist communities for five weeks now. On Friday, he and about a dozen other so-called "Lost Boys" — kids who have been kicked out or run away from the FLDS Church — were meeting lawmakers and pushing for $315,000 to help the pay for a youth drop-in center in St. George. The "House Just Off Bluff," as it's called, is being run by non-profits and volunteers putting in their own blood, sweat and tears.

The home would help kids transition to a life outside of Short Creek. Advocates for these boys and girls claim there are more than 1,000 who are either kicked out, often because they commit a "sin," or run away. They sleep on the streets or crash in apartments with others like them and are often under-educated and in danger of falling prey to drugs, alcohol and exploitation.

"I have on average two kids a week that contact me that I haven't seen before," Michelle Benward, the director of New Frontiers for Families, said of the amount of kids still seeking help. "We need full funding."

The Deseret Morning News first reported on the home last year. Generous readers donated furniture to help fill it, and the kids who would be staying there helped remodel it. The home opened in October, but can't really have anyone living there because St. George city officials haven't given them the appropriate zoning.

St. George city has been in a quandary because it has strict zoning regulations designed to crack down on schools for troubled teens. It also affects the House Just Off Bluff.

"Once you make a zone change for something like that, it affects the surrounding area," said St. George City Councilwoman Gloria Shakespeare, who is hesitant about voting for a zoning change.

Benward remains optimistic.

"I'm not seeing it as a hurdle because I believe they'll do the right thing," she said.

Meanwhile, she's seeking money from state lawmakers to help keep the house going. On Friday, Benward and her kids were shaking hands and pleading their case.

"I'm all for it. There's a very tender spot in my heart," Rep. Bud Bowman, R-Cedar City, said. "I think it'll fare good because the need is there."

While they got a lot of comments of support, they did not get a lawmaker to sponsor any specific legislation. Benward said she has meetings next week to keep pushing. Some fear that because it deals with polygamy, it may face some hurdles on Utah's Capitol Hill.

At least one of the youth was excited about the trip.

"It's pretty cool. It's probably something I never would have done if I still lived in the Creek," said Hyrum, 17, who has been out of "Short Creek" for two years now. He also did not want his last name used.

Advocates say they are still seeing children leaving the FLDS communities. The group's leader, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for rape as an accomplice. He was convicted of performing a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. While Jeffs has resigned as president of the FLDS Church, it is unclear if he is still their religious leader.

"Warren's still in charge," said Hyrum.

"No he's not 'cause he said he's not," Smith corrected him.

"They don't listen to that. I talked to my mom and she doesn't believe that," Hyrum replied. "She says they're making it up."
"I saw the video. They didn't make it up."

"Has my mom seen the video?"


http://deseretnews.com/
article/1,5143,695247384,00.html

Utah's attorney general seeks funding to aid abuse victims

Deseret Morning News

January 14, 2007

by Ben Winslow


After losing a federal grant to provide support for women and children grappling with abuse in polygamous communities, Utah's attorney general plans to ask state lawmakers to help pay for it.

The coordinator of the Safety Net Committee possibly will be part of a larger appropriations package dealing with domestic violence and abuse. That may be the only way it could get through the Legislature, said Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem.

"If, in fact, it's going to be strictly for the polygamous situation, they're going to have a higher burden of proof," Valentine said Thursday. "If it is for a ... broader, general population, they will have a very favorable outcome."

Valentine has lent his support to appropriating money for the broader purpose. The Utah Attorney General's Office is seeking funding to pay for a full-time coordinator, a case manager and funding a 24-hour domestic violence hotline.

Spawned from a 2003 town hall meeting about the "polygamy problem," the Safety Net Committee was created with advocates, representatives from polygamous groups and bureaucrats working together. Nonprofit organizations and social service agencies also were drafted to help out.

"It's always been a full-time job. I don't feel like I have the time or the resources to give what's actually needed," said Paul Murphy, who has acted as the Utah attorney general's Safety Net coordinator.

A $700,000 federal grant initially paid for a case manager, emergency housing, food and other necessities to help women and children dealing with abuse and neglect in closed societies. Authorities estimate that federal grant helped as many as 1,300 people in polygamous communities.

With the money gone, those who help battered women and abused children in polygamy have had to scale back their efforts. The DOVE Center, a domestic violence shelter in St. George, has canceled some family support groups and parenting classes. A domestic violence hotline may have to cut hours.

Those are things that Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said are desperately needed.

"With Warren Jeffs' conviction and sentencing, that whole world is opening up," Shurtleff said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News. "There are women and children who will need help, and we have to continue."

Jeffs, 52, is serving time in the Utah State Prison for rape as an accomplice. The polygamist sect leader performed a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.

The Fundamentalist LDS Church has been the principal target of Safety Net outreach efforts. The Utah Attorney General's Office hopes lawmakers will appropriate money toward a nonprofit organization that will coordinate the effort, with oversight from a steering committee.

Valentine said Shurtleff can make a case for supporting women and children in Utah, regardless of where they come from.

"If he just says, 'I want $300,000 for a polygamy czar' — no, he won't be able to win that appropriation," Valentine said.

Murphy said equal access to justice, safety and resources that can help needs to be made available to people in isolated polygamous communities.

"This is a state issue, and it's about time that the state is stepping forward to help address it," he said. "And to help pay for someone to resolve all the issues and all the problems that have been caused by 100 years of closing our eyes and assuming there wasn't any problems."

http://deseretnews.com/article/
1,5143,695243853,00.html

Portraits of Clergy Sex Abuse (Photo Essay)

Abuse is rampant among clergy, who, too often, remain unchecked in their power and unpunished for their crimes. Survivors of this abuse share their stories.


By Nina Berman, AlterNet

November 1, 2007

Photographer Carmine Galasso's recent book, Crosses: Portraits of Clergy Abuse, shows the huge, personal price paid by survivors of clergy sex crimes and their struggle to seek justice from a Catholic Church intent on covering it up.

AlterNet is pleased to present the above multimedia show from Crosses [view photos at http://www.alternet.org/
rights/66551/ ]
and an interview with David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

Nina Berman: There are many cases of individuals who are part of companies, or armies for that matter, who commit horrible crimes, and, invariably, the response by the institutional leadership is ... Well, it's just a few bad apples. How do you respond to the statement that the clergy sex abuse is just a few bad apples?


David Clohessy: First of all, no matter how you look at it, the word "few" is inaccurate. The church's own inadequate, inaccurate self-survey indicates at least 5,400 priests are proven, admitted or credibly accused child molesters. That's just the ones they acknowledge. Second, the crux of the crisis is the complicity of bishops, not the abusive priests. It's not "some bad apples." It's the barrel and the men who built and oversee the barrel.

Put another way, bishops cover up abuse because they can. Victims, parents, witnesses and Catholics who could call 911 instead report clear or potential abuse to church officials, giving those officials the time, knowledge, incentive and opportunity to hide the crimes. Those who instead turn to the justice system -- either criminal or civil -- often fail to expose predators and protect kids because of the archaic, arbitrary and dangerously restrictive statutes of limitations or because of timid, deferential or inept police or prosecutors. In either case, bishops end up, again, with the chance to abuse their power, protect their reputations, hide their assets, circle their wagons, consult their lawyers, and activate their public relations maneuvers and plans.

It is these men, the bishops, and their nearly unchecked power, that is the problem, not the "bad apple" priests.

Berman: In Crosses, there are many stories of victims being violated once by the priest/nun and then by the church, which fails to acknowledge and rectify the abuse. Why do you think the church does this?

Clohessy: The shortest answer is Lord Acton's observation that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The church is a worldwide monarchy. Each bishop is the king of his own kingdom. He answers to virtually no one. There are nearly 5,000 bishops across the globe. Their "supervision" comes every five years, when in small groups they meet face-to-face with the Pope. So there is no real oversight or monitoring of bishops. They can practically do anything they want and get by with it.

Any other institution -- a corporation, a nonprofit, even a government -- must eventually respond to pressure from its constituents. The Catholic hierarchy doesn't. Thousands of horrific felonies, callous cover-ups, distracting lawsuits, expensive settlements, and stunning media exposes have had little, if any, impact on the men at the top. No bishop takes fewer vacations, eats fewer restaurant meals, does his own laundry, or risks losing his prestigious job because of the ongoing clergy sex abuse and cover-up scandal. Given that fact, why would we expect them to change?

Berman: What dioceses are currently facing lawsuits?

Clohessy: Dozens of unresolved clergy sex abuse and cover-up lawsuits are still pending in Boston, Kansas City, Colorado, and elsewhere.

Berman: Can you describe a current or ongoing situation where a diocese has been notified of a problematic priest or nun and done nothing despite enormous evidence?

Clohessy: Consider Fr. Donald McGuire. As far back as 1969, his crimes were reported to his Jesuit supervisors. Last year, he was criminally convicted of molesting two boys. Twice in the last two months, he's been accused in civil lawsuits of molesting boys in Chicago as recently as 2003 and 2004.

Yet McGuire remains free while he appeals his conviction, and the Jesuits let him live with friends in a Chicago suburb. SNAP has repeatedly begged the Jesuits to force him into a secure, remote treatment center so that kids can be safe and that he can get therapy. They ignore our pleas.

Twice in the last three years, St. Louis' archbishop has put out-of-state, sexually troubled priests in an inner city parish with a parochial school, with no warning to the parishioners. (One had sexually assaulted a female parishioner who had got a settlement from the priest's home diocese. The other had been found with child porn on his computer.)

Today, Fresno's bishop has a parish priest in active parish ministry who was found, by a jury in a civil trial last year, to have molested a boy. After the jury verdict, the bishop publicly said, "I still believe the priest is innocent."

Berman: SNAP has called for Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to fire his friend and employee Monsignor Alan Placa. Why have you made that statement, and can you tell us about Monsignor Placa?

Clohessy: Placa is a priest at the Rockville Centre diocese in Long Island, who stands accused of molesting at least three boys. In 2003, in a thorough grand jury probe, Placa was found to have concealed dozens of molestation cases. (He wasn't charged because of the statute of limitations.) There's ample evidence showing that Placa consistently protected predators, shrewdly deceived victims and covered up horrific clergy sex crimes. By his own admissions, he never reported these devastating crimes to law enforcement, and he advised dozens of other Catholic officials across the country on how to do likewise. (Read the grand jury's report at BishopAccountability.org.)

He's also Rudy Giuliani's longtime friend and on Giuliani's payroll at the ex-mayor's consulting firm. We believe Giuliani has a moral duty to fire Placa and to publicly apologize to Long Island Catholics and Placa's victims for knowingly hiring a man who clearly, repeatedly and intentionally helped hide child sex crimes by clergy.

Berman: Can you tell me when SNAP was formed?

Clohessy: SNAP was started in 1989 in Chicago by a survivor named Barbara Blaine. SNAP now has roughly 8,000 members and self-help chapters in 65 cities.

Berman: Sexual abuse by clergy has been going on a long time, but in the past few years, it seems to have captured the public's attention. How did this happen, and what has SNAP's role been in keeping the issue alive?

Clohessy: Only very gradually and partially have thousands of clergy sex crimes and cover-ups finally begun to surface publicly in recent years. This crisis has started to garner widespread attention because of the courage of survivors, the outrage of parishioners, the persistence of journalists, the reforms of lawmakers and, to a lesser degree, the determination and creativity of police and prosecutors. But make no mistake about it: Everything starts with the courage of an individual survivor.

To put it another way, Martin Luther King said, "No lie lives forever."

Berman: Taking on the Catholic Church is a huge challenge. How do you do it, how do you win and what is the hardest or most frustrating part of the struggle?

Clohessy: Complacency, timidity and naïveté are the most frustrating parts of our work.

Some are complacent and comfort themselves by assuming that increased public awareness automatically means fewer offenses and deceit. That's a dangerous assumption. Molesters always have and will seek positions of access to and power over kids. Institutions, especially old, hierarchical, secretive, all-male ones, always have and always will tend to "protect their own."

Some are timid about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. If they share what they know, many Catholics even now say things like, "I may lose my church job." Or, "My kids may be kicked out of parochial school."

Finally, some are terribly naïve and believe bishops' relentless public relations claims that they've "learned" and "reformed."

We can engage in wishful thinking, foolishly believing that some policies and panels are "fixing everything." Or we can engage in realistic thinking, realizing that virtually none of the underlying causes of the crisis have been addressed. We can accept that the bishops' "reforms" are largely window dressing and keep pushing for real, effective remedies.

The Crosses book launch, an exhibition, will be held Nov. 1 from 7 to 10 p.m. at Gallery@Spencerlofts, 60 Dudley Street, Chelsea, Mass.

Crosses is published by Trolley Books. For more information, or to purchase the book, go to www.trolleybooks.com.


http://www.alternet.org/rights/66551/?page=entire

Conquering coercion: Wellspring Retreat helps former cult members recover

The Post Online - Ohio
October 17, 2007

Amanda Wilcosky / Staff Writer

Paul Martin was a doctoral student in the ’70s when a traveling “rock band” in a Volkswagen took control of his life.

Dropping out of school, Martin spent more than seven years in what he called a “Jesus freak hippie commune.” Only later did he realize it was a cult.

“I never thought I was in a cult,” he said. “I thought I was in a bad group. Other people got involved with cults, but not me.”

Martin finally left after becoming critical of the practices and enduring psychological abuse from the leader. Years later, research about thought reform and brainwashing by Robert Lifton helped him to realize the nature of the group.

In 1986, after earning a Ph.D. in counseling, Martin founded the Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center, a nonprofit organization in the hills of Albany, Ohio. Wellspring is the only residential facility in the world that treats people who have been in cults or abusive relationships, said Donna Adams, Wellspring’s clinical director.

A new type of treatment

When it was time to form a treatment model for clients, Martin looked to Lifton’s work.

“That’s what we’ve done here over the last 22 years, is applied this thought reform model to how we treat people — and it’s worked,” he said. He added that tests conducted directly after treatment and again six months later have shown significant improvements in client depression and anxiety levels.

The Wellspring model describes to individuals how they were recruited and how group dynamics kept them from thinking independently, Martin said.

One concept introduced to clients is the law of reciprocity. This occurs when a person is drawn into a group through a series of favors and then feels indebted to it, Martin said.

Also included in the model is the idea that cults present a sacred science, claiming “ ‘we have the truth, no one else has the truth,’ which almost defines a cult in and of itself,” he said.

Another cult technique described by Adams is the use of loaded language, phrases that are easily memorized to keep members brainwashed.

“Anytime somebody has any kind of critical thought or criticism of the group, these little phrases serve as a means of shutting down your critical thinking,” she said.

Client care and research

Each year, Wellspring treats clients from all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia, according to Guidestar.org, a database that provides information about nonprofit organizations.

“We see just about everything — New Age, Eastern, Western, eclectic, Bible-oriented, business cults, political cults and one-on-one, domestic violence situations,” Martin said. Women who have been abused see the facility’s Web site feel that their situation is very much like cult coercion and come for treatment, he added.

Martin believes that a lack of freedom is the defining characteristic of a cult.

“When you think that something is controlling most of your life, it’s not a religion, it’s not a belief system anymore — it’s tyranny,” he said.

Wellspring staff does not perform cult interventions. Instead, clients come to the center only after leaving their group, often waiting 3 to 5 years, Adams said. She added that many have tried some sort of counseling before coming to Wellspring.

Most of Wellspring’s clients complete a two-week program while staying on site in a scenic lodge, complete with a library, art and music workshops and outdoor hiking trails.

Wellspring is funded through nominal fees for services, grants and private donations from supporters, according to Guidestar.org. Approximately 70 percent of clients who are in need of services are unable to pay, according to the site. A Victim’s Assistance Program, which underwrites treatment for those who are eligible, was established in 1993.

To investigate what initially attracts individuals to coercive groups, Wellspring staff and graduate students from the Ohio University psychology department transcribed more than 500 client questionnaires collected from 1995-2006.

The researchers found several trends that influenced membership, including the charisma of the leader; a search for salvation; being born into the group; a sense of family; and a transitional period.

In June, OU doctoral student Lindsay Orchowski presented the findings at the International Cultic Studies Association Conference in Brussels, Belgium.

“To learn that there are students in college and in grad school who are affected by coercive relationships and groups really startled me because we always think, ‘it can never happen to me,’ ” Orchowski said.

College coercion

According to the Athens Police Department, cult-related crimes and activity have not been a problem in recent history, but coercive groups can be a concern for college students.

“The main thing that draws people into these situations in college is transition,” Martin said, adding that freshman and senior year are the most vulnerable times for recruitment.

Orchowski is the co-founder of the Counselor-in-Residence program, a walk-in service located in Jefferson Hall. She urged any student who feels that he or she has been manipulated by a group or individual to talk to a friend, family member or counselor.

Martin, Adams and Orchowski agreed that those who become involved with cults or abusive groups do not have a predisposed weakness and should not be stigmatized.

“I don’t care how strong one’s personality is. These techniques, I really believe, have the capacity to overwhelm even the strongest individual,” Martin said.

He also believes that the public is uninformed about the impact of cults and coercive groups.

“They’re just completely unaware that this affects at least 1-2 percent of the population, comparatively much larger than your typical childhood diseases,” he said.

http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/Articles/Culture/2007/10/17/21768/

'Jane Doe' no longer seeks anonymity, shows photo

Salt Lake Tribune - September 22, 2007


Nearly two years after leveling first civil and then criminal allegations against Warren S. Jeffs, a young woman has moved away from anonymity.
Elissa Wall on Friday released a photo of herself and agreed to the publication of the name she used in 2001, when she was the 14-year-old bride of her 19-year-old cousin. On Saturday, she released a photo of herself being fitted in her wedding dress.
She wants to remind people how young she was at the time of the wedding, performed by Jeffs, and subsequent alleged rapes by her husband, said Greg Hoole, one of her attorneys.
"A photo will help people keep that in mind," Hoole said.
Now 21, married, and the mother of two children, she is in a witness protection program and has legally changed her name, he said.
The date of the photo released Friday is unknown. Wall's attorneys say she estimates it was taken in autumn 2001 during a trip to Canada.
He added he also hoped to satisfy reporters' curiosity about Wall and pre-empt them from seeking her out.
On Monday, a jury will resume deliberations on two counts of rape as an accomplice against Jeffs.
The photo released Friday by Wall was not used as evidence in the case. Instead, jurors saw the photo released Saturday along with others of Wall and her husband, Allen Steed.
While Wall has been testifying in Jeffs' high-profile criminal trial, she also has been negotiating for a significant settlement in her own lawsuit against him.
That lawsuit was filed in December 2005, before the criminal charges were filed against Jeffs. She sued him, his sect - the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - and a communal property trust it once ran in its traditional home base of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
Her proposed settlement with the trust calls for her to receive eight building lots in the towns, four acres in Maxwell Canyon in Hildale, and the creation of a $1 million education/assistance fund for teens displaced from the polygamous community.
Hoole said Wall wants her lawsuit to also benefit others. "It's to help anyone who is trapped in that community to get out," he said.
- Brooke Adams and Nate Carlisle

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_6969028

Girl, 14, fled abuse, 'mind control' of polygamy

CNN - September 11, 2007

From Amanda Townsend and Agnes Pawlowski

(CNN) -- Sara Hammon saw some of her sisters pulled out of school to be married to men they didn't know. She dreaded a similar fate. And so, she ran away from home before she was old enough to drive legally.

She left behind 19 mothers, 74 siblings, and a father she says could never remember her name, even though he repeatedly molested her.

And, she left behind a culture she says was oppressive for young women.

Hammon recently gave CNN a deeply disturbing account of her life inside the polygamous sect whose leader, Warren Jeffs, goes on trial this week in Utah.

Jeffs is accused of being an accomplice to rape. The charge stems from his alleged practice of arranging polygamous marriages between child brides and older male followers.

Hammon is not directly involved in the charges against Jeffs, which concern an arranged marriage between a girl, 14 and her 19-year-old cousin. She left the sect before she could be placed in an arranged marriage. But she is one of its most outspoken former members.

"Probably the worst part of the whole theology," she said, " is the treatment of women and teaching women that they are not equal to men."

"They have to have a husband in order to get to the highest degree of heaven, and not only a husband but they have to allow the husband to have two other wives," she added.

Hammon was born in Hilldale, Utah, and raised in Colorado City, Arizona, towns where followers of Jeffs -- the President and Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) -- freely practice polygamy.

The FLDS broke more than a century ago from the mainline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, over the practice of polygamy.

The Mormon church, which gave up plural marriage more than a century ago, has renounced Jeffs' group.

Hammon was the first 14-year-old girl to successfully leave the FLDS, she said. Almost 20 years later, she recalls the time she spent inside the compound as being filled with fear. She speaks out as part of her work with The Hope Organization, a non-profit group based in St. George, Utah, that assists victims of abusive polygamous relationships.

"There was a tremendous amount of abuse in our home," Hammon said. "It happened on a daily basis and there was all kinds: sexual, physical, emotional, mental. My brothers were sexually abusive. Some of my mothers were physically abusive."

But it was her father -- an FLDS church leader -- who terrified her. He began sexually abusing her before she turned 5, Hammon said. He even tried to molest her on his deathbed when she was 13, she said.

"For me, he was a very mean person. I didn't know him while we lived in the same house for 13 years and he had to ask me my name every time he saw me.

"In fact, the question he would ask is, 'What is your name and who is your mother?' and that was the only way he could identify that I was his child," Hammon said.

Three of her older sisters were placed in marriages before they finished high school, including one who was 16 when she married a 62-year-old man, Hammon said. She recalled that one sister had two days notice before her wedding.

Hammon said girls in the compound were prepared for a similar destiny all their lives, but she knew from a young age she didn't want any part of it.

"It was like marching to the guillotine because I saw pictures of my mother before she got married and she was just so confident.

"Her posture was just excellent and she had a beautiful face and smile... and then I watched her deteriorate after she got married and I watched her go through so much emotional pain and that was what I felt was in store for me if I got married," she said.

Hammon described her father's wives as second-class citizens in the household who became shells of themselves the moment he came into the room. She called it mind control. Her mother had more than two dozen nervous breakdowns, she said.

"I don't know how a woman can allow another woman to come into her home and cook some supper up with the family for her and go to bed with her husband that night and respect herself.

"I don't see how that is possible. You have to let a part of yourself go. A part of something in you, you have to squash that down in order to live with that every day," she said.

It was a fate Hammon escaped with the help of a family she'd been babysitting for outside the compound. About a year after her father died, she asked them if she could stay and they agreed. Hammon says her mother didn't believe she could stop her.

Almost two decades later, the memories of her childhood haunt her. Hammon said she doesn't date much.

"I watched my mom just die emotionally and I relate that to marriage," she said.

Still, she doesn't entirely blame Jeffs for what she went through inside the FLDS community.

"I think that Warren Jeffs is the fall guy for something that has been going on for generations," Hammon said.


"Warren Jeffs is just a person to focus on. This system is a well-oiled machine, there's always going to be somebody to step up and take his place. What he has done is terrible... but I know a lot of other men who were out there and in charge who did some pretty terrible things too. Nobody was paying attention then," she said.

Jeffs was captured August 28, 2006, in a traffic stop near Las Vegas, Nevada. At the time, he had been on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List for months.


http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/09/11/fleeing.polygamy.hammon/index.html