FLDS stands for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The sect rules in Colorado City, the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, and elsewhere. Their way of life robs human rights from tens of thousands of Americans.
Abuse of boys
The ratio of boys to girls everywhere is about 50:50, yet the FLDS system requires one man having many wives. It follows that most boys must be kicked out. Typically, a boy with any sign of normal unruliness is wrenched from the community with little warning, and dumped on the highway or in a neighboring community with little education or means of support. They are forbidden contact with home except an occasional call to their mother. It's not surprising that many turn to suicide or drugs.
Abuse of girls
All FLDS children are indoctrinated and isolated from mainstream society. By the time they reach legal age to marry, many girls, if they had freedom to chose, would refuse to mary old men already with many wives, despite having been taught that their salvation depends on it. So church leaders marry them before they reach legal age, while they are still compliant. Having children then binds them to the community. Leaving the sect then becomes impossible, because they would have to abandon their children to make a new life in an alien world for which they have no skills--a world they have been taught to fear. This indoctrination plus forced marriage amounts to modern slavery.
"Trafficking" in women
Church leaders have absolute power to decide which man a girl will marry. They even have the power to remove the wives and children from a man they decide isn't loyal enough. This becomes a powerful tool for controlling other members of the sect. Women become commodities, traded to bolster the power of leaders. In this sense, the FLDS is little more than a crime syndicate like the Mafia. Rather than dealing in drugs for money, they deal in women for power.
The Mann Act prohibits trafficking of women across state lines and is sometimes used to
prosecute polygamists.
It's organized crime
Benjamin Bistline, who lived with the FLDS for many years, describes their leadership: They "have decades of experience in business, in hiding from and manipulating the government, and in developing strategies to keep people from knowing much about them. They know the law and how to use it to their advantage. These men are highly skilled, articulate communicators. They will publicly and persuasively state what local citizens and authorities want to hear, and then secretly carry out their own agenda, believing that any lie they tell is approved by God. They have done this for seventy-five years and there is no reason to think they will now change. The outward impression they make on strangers works. They are seen a decent and thoughtful men."
Source
In their own words
Read parts of letter to Ben Bistline from a follower of Warren Jeffs:
"My job is to protect the prophet Warren Jeffs and the Lords chosen people from you cockroaches and scum. I'm sick and tired of the harassment we get here. It seems like every other day you gentiles and apostates are looking down our throats trying to make trouble. Why don't you just leave us alone! The truth is, you're jealous because you can't have what we got. We got priesthood and that makes our women and children obedient to us. "
"We live a different more religious way of life and you shouldn't hate us because of it. You're green with envy because your wifes argue and will leave you if you don't bow and scrape to their needs. Your children don't obey you. All they want to do is watch TV and play computer games. You gentiles don't know how to direct women and children because you don't know about priesthood. You don't understand what it takes to be the priesthood leader of a family. We have to raise our children like calves in a stall."
Source: p. 206-7.
