A 12-year-old girl rides in the backseat of a van to a remote location. She is unaware of where she is going, how much further is left, and when she will arrive. She sits quietly next to her mother. There aren’t enough tears left within to cry any longer. The girl asks, “What does he think about this marriage? How does he feel about marrying a child?”
Her father nonchalantly replies from the front seat, “Oh, he’s done it before.”
This is a very real tale of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints community in the United States. The experiences of FLDS children, including but not limited to brainwashing, coercion, and most notably, child marriages, resulted in harrowing effects on their childhoods. Issues such as child marriage are not only the reality for FLDS children but also tens of thousands of children around the nation. Today, under specific conditions, child marriage is legal in 44 U.S. states, due to extensive loopholes that put children in danger of predators, assault, and trauma. The FLDS is one example of what can occur when legislation doesn’t prioritize the rights and safety of young people. To better understand the larger conversation on national child marriage, it is imperative to look into such groups and observe how the law enables such a heinous crime.
The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, initially founded in 1856, branched off from the Mormon faith to ensure its followers could practice polygamy. Today, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center labels FLDS a “white-supremacist, homophobic, anti-government, totalitarian cult.” Young boys are raised to believe that it is their right to have multiple wives, and young girls are taught that their life’s purpose is to obey their husbands. The church’s modern leaders, the late Rulon Jeffs, and his son, convicted predator Warren Jeffs, are responsible for normalizing this thought process. Both Rulon and Warren Jeffs have held the position of Prophet — the man believed to have been called on by God to lead the FLDS community away from eternal damnation. With this power over the community, both created a culture of fear, especially among the women he dominated.
To Warren Jeffs and other FLDS men, young women were simply seen as methods to produce a lineage and attain salvation. One of the most appalling FLDS traditions is forced child marriages to older male predators. Parents would present their daughters to Warren as soon as God deemed them ready for marriage — a heavily plagued meter controlled by FLDS men and Warren himself. Devout mothers and fathers allowed their middle-school-aged daughters into nonconsensual unities. The FLDS violated these girls and their rights, stripped them of their innocence, and forced upon their lives they did not wish to live. The most well-known instance occurred in 2006 to 12-year-old Merrianne Jessop, Warren Jeffs’ youngest wife. When investigators took over the Yearning for Zion Ranch in El Dorado, Texas, they found the temple bed Warren used to consummate his marriage with Merrianne. Warren, who was 50 years old at the time, raped Merriane, a 12-year-old, and allowed a number of his other wives to watch this “heavenly session.”
While Merriane’s story is jarring, it is not the only one within the FLDS or even within the greater United States. Countless young girls fall victim to marriages with significantly older, oftentimes abusive, men. Though child marriage has been declared a human rights abuse by the U.S. State Department, it is permitted under certain circumstances in 44 U.S. states. Among these states, 20 have no minimum age for marriage if conducted with a parental or judicial waiver, and over 300,000 child marriages have taken place since 2000. In some of these states, children can be pressured into marriage by their families, abusers, and even religious leaders — as seen in the FLDS community.
For instance, in California, children can be married at any age as long as one parent and one judge approve, even if the marriage is to an adult several years older. Judges rarely have enough information to determine if parental approval is actually parental coercion. This issue is often worsened when a teen becomes pregnant. Adults can be driven to support child marriages out of social fears and pressures like the stigma surrounding pregnancies out of wedlock. Not to mention, the financial strain of supporting a teen parent may dramatically impact family savings. Together, these influencing factors coerce parents into supporting child marriages that they otherwise would not, which overworked, unconcerned judges find convincing enough to approve.
What’s more egregious — in many states, child marriage waivers allow for legal statutory rape, where one of the parties involved in sexual activity is younger than the age of consent. What should be considered a heinous crime is sanctioned by law if the people engaging in sexual activity are married to each other?
Despite the fact that child marriage exists in law books and practice, most Americans have no idea about its prevalence. A recent survey revealed that nearly half of the Americans polled believed that child marriage was already illegal throughout the U.S., suggesting a false understanding that child marriages don’t occur within the United States. However, this is a matter with a long history in this country — the supposed global champion of human rights. How can the United States hold other countries accountable for their human rights violations when it overlooks its own?
The FLDS community and its leaders provide a small but important look into the many legal atrocities that occur every day within the “freest country” in the world. While it is easy to blame FLDS predators for the atrocities they’ve committed toward minors, and rightfully so, it is equally the fault of the legislators enabling these actions. To protect our children and their rights, we must support legislators who have the best interest of all Americans at heart.
Image by Jessica Kille licensed under the Unsplash License.
