BishopAccountability.org
	Anti-Polygamy Activist Blames Utah-Arizona Inaction for Texas Raid By Brooke Adams Salt Lake Tribune April 9, 2008 http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_8864530 City, Ariz., by seizing its communal property trust in 2005. That trust remains under court oversight. Jessop has always maintained the states have not done enough, however. Jessop, who left the sect when she was 16, has spent the past decade helping other teens and women leave the FLDS church. She won't say whether she knows the teen involved in this case, but Jessop told The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday that authorities had identified the wrong man as her husband. She also said the girl's husband had broken her ribs - something revealed in an affidavit released by Texas authorities on Tuesday. Jessop has called the massive investigation the girl's call triggered a "colossal mistake" because it smacks of the 1953 Short Creek Raid, in which Arizona authorities took approximately 263 women and children into custody in an effort to stamp out polygamy. She said the women and children who have been rounded up and sent to Fort Concho or the Wells Fargo Pavilion are unlikely to share the sort of information sought by authorities - names of fathers, dates of births, ages. "First of all, they are all terrified they are going to hell if they talk to anybody," she said. "They've been taught their entire lives not to reveal who their mother is, who their father is. It's part of the culture of secrecy. And secrecy breeds isolation." She believes many of the children at the ranch were sent there by parents in other states and claims they were taken from those families and given to "more worthy" ones. The 16-year-old girl whose call to a family shelter triggered the investigation said as much in her phone calls for help to an unnamed family shelter in Texas. Jessop said one girl told her "The men own the babies, not the mothers." Texas authorities said Tuesday during a press conference that many of the children do not appear to have parents there. Jessop also said that one way young teens were enticed to stay at the ranch was their infants were given to other plural wives - women who shared a common husband - to raise. "If they spread the children out to other women," she said, "the mothers are not going to leave." Contact: brooke@sltrib.com
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.