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(AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Lori Prichard and Carole Mikita reporting
Texas authorities found 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 when they raided the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) polygamist compound in Eldorado, Texas. Today they say 31 of them, nearly 60 percent, already have children or are pregnant.
Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) calls it a distinct and pervasive pattern, a pattern of forcing teenage girls into spiritual marriages and sex with much older men. Texas officials claim that's precisely why they removed all 463 children from the YFZ Ranch.
University of Utah Professor Linda Smith, who specializes in family law, says this points to why Texas authorities took all of the children. "With the teens being engaged in sexual activity at a very young age with the consent of their parents, the court has good authority to have oversight over these children and over their siblings," she said.
Jodi Grizzle, of the Children's Service Society of Utah, says most girls that age are already going through the oftentimes rocky and rough years of adolescence. "Teenagers don't have the ability to think abstractly. Our brains don't finish developing until we're in our 20s. So you have a teenager with a significant life event, and they aren't necessarily capable of comprehending all of the implications."
Grizzle says teenagers, generally, are hard pressed to comprehend the implications of something as monumental as parenthood. "The world is still revolving around them. That's where they're at. So, to throw in an infant that is so utterly dependent and to expect a teenager to be in that role, it's going to be a challenge," she said.
A challenge on top of what could be more challenges to overcome. "Rape, incest, whatever those circumstances were, they've come to find themselves in the situation that they're pregnant. Those factors are going to have as much of an impact, possibly more in many ways, than just the fact that they're pregnant alone," Grizzle said.
According to Texas authorities, these girls were children forced to make the giant leap into adulthood. "In terms of adolescence, a good analogy I think of often is it's like a bridge between childhood where there is complete dependence and adulthood, where there is independence. Teenagers are on the middle of that bridge," Grizzle said.
The FLDS have certainly taken issue with Texas officials and their numbers of how old these girls are. An FLDS spokesman believes at least a third of them are actually over 18. Here are some other numbers: According to CPS, the number of girls between the ages of 14 and 17 removed from the ranch is more than three times the number of boys in the same age group.
CPS officials say reports of missing children this weekend were not true. The information about lost children came from attorneys for some of the FLDS mothers.
"Our efforts to contact CPS did not yield this information, and so our argument was that these children were missing. As of earlier this afternoon, CPS is telling us they have located the children and that the information is going to be passed along to us," said Cynthia Martinez, with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.
CPS officials tell a different story. "There are no missing children. There are no unaccounted for children. There never have been any unaccounted for children," said CPS's Patrick Crimmins. "We have a lot of children who have similar names, we have different names for some of the children, we have different birthdates for some of the children."
The legal aid office also says three children were hospitalized this weekend; one has since been released. Their mothers were given permission to visit them in the hospitals.
Also this afternoon, we received word that an appellate judge in Dallas will privately review computer hard drives and 1,000 boxes of documents seized at the FLDS ranch. Apparently, those boxes and hard drives include letters written by FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, church membership lists, genealogy charts, medical records and handwritten notations pertaining to ongoing criminal cases.
Some of that information may fall into what's called "clergy-penitent privilege." In other words, they could be protected as religious documents. The judge must privately look at them to determine what can be used as evidence and what has to be kept private.
E-mail: cmikita@ksl.com
E-mail: lprichard@ksl.com
