Polygamist children to have state care, DNA tests

An excerpt:

A Houston child psychiatrist testified today in the custody hearing for 416 children from a polygamist sect that the group's sheltered environment makes members more immature than children in the outside world.

Dr. Bruce Perry said the adherence by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to underage marriage and underage sex puts all children at risk.

"I think that young girls — 14, 15, 16 (years) — are not mature enough to consent to a marriage," Perry said, testifying for the state of Texas.

Raised in a highly authoritarian culture, girls grew up believing that marrying early and having multiple children was their only option, Perry said. Boys grew up to perpetuate the abuse. Perry said he found even adults to be much less mature and less capable of making their own decisions.

"We found these children grow up to be 10, but they have the thinking patterns of a much younger child," he said.

These mothers don't look particularly devastated, upset, or unhappy, don't you think?

Excerpt:

Several mothers were called by their attorneys to the witness stand late Friday and told the judge they would not let their daughters get married before the age of 18. The state contends that girls as young as 13 or 14 have been forced into marrying older men at the compound owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

“I want to protect her,” said Merilyn Jeffs, 29.

She testified that she has two sisters on the ranch who are 18 and 19 and are married with children around 1 or 2. She said she did not know how old they were when they married.

Maureen Jessop, 25, said she married at 18, which she now believes may have been too young.

“Sometimes I felt immature at 18,” she said.

But, a child psychiatrist who worked with children of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco testified earlier that the kids in the polygamist Yearning For Zion Ranch were in danger of growing up with underdeveloped brains that would leave them unprepared for the outside world.

Dr. Bruce Perry, said that among the risks the ranch children face is an inability to develop healthy relationships or to make their own decisions — resulting in, for example, 15-year-olds with the emotional capacities of six-year-olds.

“That makes them highly vulnerable to individuals who would exploit this child-like quality,” Dr. Perry said.

His testimony was intended to support the state’s arguments that the overall environment on the ranch is unhealthy and even dangerous to all the children, not just a few girls who may have been sexually abused

In many ways, he said, the environment the children live in is healthy, the mothers appear to be loving, the boys are happy, he said, "but there are parts of what they do that are very destructive."

In cases of polygamy in other situations, there has been evidence of sexual and physical abuse. Girls are "trained" early on to be wives even by their own fathers. I can't support a group that forces girls to breed at an early age and I suspect they'll find evidence of physical abuse as well.