What Do We Tell the Children?
Photo by Flickr user f_mafra. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The Associated Press's Michelle Roberts, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer points to the bitter psychosis of conservative sexual traditions that allowed a "polygamist" child-sex ring in Texas indoctrinate and manipulate their victims with threats that *if* they left the "church compound" they might be goddamn fucking *molested!* (Italics mine)
The [16-year-old --fl] girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would "beat and hurt" her when he got angry, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby.
The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to "the outsiders' world" but didn't know where.
...
In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against her will. If she left, church members told her, "outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and (modern) clothes and to have sex with lots of men."
At the end of the call, she began to cry.
Yeah, stick around while a 50-year-old who received you from some other "elder" without you having much say in the matter repeatedly impregnates you, beginning at age 12, and beats and chokes you while one of his other "wives" holds your babies, because otherwise you might be forced to have sex. (Talk about the perversity of the "no-sex" class paradigm!)
How fucking charming is that anyway? I'm going to go way out on a limb and say I'm not sure which is worse, the coerced pedophilia by custodial adults or the victim (and indeed, often in these cases *perpetrator!!!*) indoctrination required to sustain it.
Notice also the "appeal to femininity" in the threat that "outsiders" would force her to cut her hair!
Have you read Under the Banner of Heaven?
[Funny, no I haven't. But I actually know a few very liberal-to-radical Mormons (yes, they evidently do exist) who've told me about it, and I know a few activists in the intermountain west who know the author. The whole thing freaks me out *not* because those guys are a-historical abberations but because (polygamy notwithstanding), they're sort of like Bizarro Amish or Shakers representing what life used to be like for huge chunks of western civilization. In other words they're horrifying to me not just for who they are but for where *we all came from!* Thanks, Mag. --fl]