Interviews with hundreds of children removed from a polygamist sect in Texas have revealed that several underage girls were forced into "spiritual marriage" with much older men as soon as they reached puberty and were then made pregnant, according to investigators.
A total of 416 children, mainly girls, have now been taken into state custody after five days of raids on the Yearn for Zion ranch in Eldorado, west Texas. Court documents reveal the children were removed for fear they were at risk of "emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse".
A further 139 women left the ranch voluntarily to accompany the girls, and are being held with them. A local court has granted state custody of all the children until a hearing later this month.
The 1,700-acre ranch is the retreat of a group from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a 10,000-strong splinter sect that broke with the main Mormon church when it denounced polygamy in the 1890s. The compound was built in 2004 in a remote location in the prairies by Warren Jeffs, the then "prophet" of the sect who is currently in jail in Arizona awaiting trial over charges relating to the arranged marriages of three teenage girls. He has already been sentenced to 10 years to life imprisonment in the state of Utah.
The raids were sparked by a telephone call from a 16-year-old girl inside the Yearn for Zion compound to a local family violence shelter on March 29. She said she had been forced to become the seventh "spiritual wife" of a man aged 50, who made her pregnant with a child, now aged eight months, and then made her pregnant for a second time. The girl said other girls, some as young as 13, had been forced to have sex with older men for procreation. She said she had been beaten by her "husband" so badly that on one occasion several of her ribs were broken. The beatings included hitting her on the chest and choking her, the affidavit says, while another woman held her baby.
The police are searching for the man, Dale Barlow. They are also continuing to search for the girl, whose identity has not been released and who has yet to be found among the 416 children taken into care.
The court papers give new details about the isolated life of the sect.
The compound is self-sufficient, in order to avoid contact with the "outsiders' world". In addition to a temple, the ranch includes a cement factory, a school, a cheese factory and medical centre. Women wear home-sewn dresses and are not allowed to wear red, which Jeffs decreed was reserved for Jesus, or cut their hair. They live on a diet of dairy produce, vegetables, berries, nuts and honey.
Sect members were only allowed out of the compound for emergencies. The 16-year-old who sounded the alarm told the shelter that she had been warned that if she left the ranch, "outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and to have sex with lots of men", the documents say.
Several of the teenage girls were found to have children or are pregnant. Many could not spell their last names or state their birth date.
The sect believes that polygamy for men is an essential religious practice. Underage girls were married to older men of the church's choosing, the affidavit says.
The leader of the ranch, Merrill Jessop, has called for a public outcry over the raids, saying the "hauling off of women and children matches anything in Russia or Germany".
Lawyers for the church have filed a court petition to quash the searches on the grounds they are unconstitutional as the authorities lack sufficient evidence to justify the intrusion.