Recent news media has swarmed over the high costs of Texas’ raid on the FLDS Zion ranch, and on placing hundreds of children in foster homes. What are the real costs, however? Crunch the numbers, says Marci Hamilton.

Recently, I debated Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff on NPR about his office’s failure to vigorously prosecute polygamists in his state, where it is well-known that underage girls are being subjected to polygamous marriage and underage sex. While Attorney General Shurtleff had to agree to the facts of the harm, his defense was that it is too expensive to pursue polygamists on child abuse charges. The headlines blaring the facts of the financial accounting in Texas — as if it were shocking that protecting children and defending litigation would cost money — provide an echo of such reasoning.

Abuse victims repeat the cycle. FDLS mothers are “single” mothers, collecting welfare on every child they have. Victims likely will not be as productive as they otherwise could be. Boys are dumped on corners. Studies in Minnesota have attempted to tackle the question of costs, but in her FindLaw column today, Marci argues that they’re much higher than the cost of enforcement.

The status quo [of non-enforcement] is not just a moral outrage, but also an irrational economic situation. The costs to society of sexual abuse are enormous: Victims suffer from drug addiction; alcoholism; mental illness, often rising to the level of disability; suicide, and broken marriages, and as workers may be less productive than they could have been. The harm does not just extend to the victims, but also to their families, their future families, and eventually the entire economy.

In 2007, Minnesota estimated the state’s costs of sexual violence in 2005 at almost $8 billion, or $1,540/resident. According to the report, moreover, these are a “fraction of the true costs.” Child sexual abuse was a significant component of the study; the costs of child sex abuse were deemed to average $184,000/victim, exceeding the cost of adult rape, which averaged $139,000/victim. And those are just the immediate costs arising out of a self-contained event of abuse, not the long-term and astronomical costs generated by continuing effects. Suffice it to say that, when we fail to deter or stop sexual abuse, we pay. A lot.

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Why The Texas Supreme Court’s Ruling Regarding the FLDS Mothers Is Significantly More Protective of the Children Involved than the Media Have Painted It To Be

by Marci Hamilton for findlaw

Recently, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the state’s Third Circuit appellate court’s ruling that Child Protective Services (CPS) lacked adequate evidence to justify taking all of the children from the FLDS’s Yearning for Zion compound. However, as I will explain, there are significant differences between the two rulings, which bode well for the endangered children of the FLDS.

The Texas Supreme Court Affirms that CPS Has Ongoing Jurisdiction

The lower appellate court’s decision might have been interpreted as divesting CPS of any ongoing involvement, for the court did not make it clear what role it thought either CPS or Judge Walther might play in the future. Accordingly, that decision was misread by some as a complete vindication of the parents and as an order to return the children to the compound as soon as possible. That is certainly how the public relations people for the FLDS played it. Indeed, they tried to go further and convince the news media that the decision showed that there never was any abuse in the first place. They were wrong.

The Texas Supreme Court made it clear that CPS’s investigation of abuse was far from over. Indeed, it made a point of listing the means by which the district court could further protect the children, even as they were permitted to return to the compound. The court pointed out that the Texas Family Code permitted the court “broad authority” to prohibit the removal of the children from a designated geographical area, to direct the removal of an alleged perpetrator from a child’s home, and to issue orders assisting CPS in its investigation. Then the court pointedly stated that the “Code prohibits interference with an investigation, and a person who relocates a residence or conceals a child with the intent to interfere with an investigation commits an offense.” Finally, the decision ended with the blunt statement that the appellate decision below “did not conclude the [CPS] proceedings.” CPS then followed up in the lower court with a number of suggested conditions for release that would further the ends of preventing relocation or concealment. (Judge Walther subsequently approved an agreement between the parties consistent with the limitations approved in the Supreme Court’s opinion. The parents may not take their children out of Texas, must keep the court informed of each child’s location, and may not interfere with further investigation, among other requirements.)

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According to the New York Times front page story today, the Texas raid on the FLDS compound in Eldorado, Texas, “rattles other polygamists.”

Marci Hamilton

Apparently, FLDS members outside Texas are poring over the documents retrieved by the state to learn the whereabouts of their own relatives (including the location of men who have one large polygamous family, say in Arizona, and another in Texas!). The church elders obviously do not feel it is necessary to keep members abreast of where they have directed each individual to live. I won’t be the first to note the extraordinary amount of mental control the FLDS leaders exert over their followers.

The real story behind the New York Times report, though, is the appalling and widespread failure to enforce the anti-polygamy laws. A woman is pictured with the caption, “Polygamy is not the problem.” Well, actually, polygamy would be a legal problem but for the prosecutors who have chosen to make it a dead letter on their own. The Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, of Utah is so busy working with polygamist groups, he apparently does not have time to read the law books, or perhaps he just does not care about the rule of law. He, especially, cannot ignore the anti-polygamy laws, because it is a condition for Utah’s statehood in plain language in Utah’s constitution.

He and other enforcement officials in the west persist in arguing that the only approach they can take is to prosecute one man at a time, which has done next to nothing to protect the children in these compounds. Is that really how they approach the prosecution of dangerous gangs and drug cartels? This is a willful decision to ignore the mounting evidence in Texas that the compound housed a conspiracy of adults that furthered widespread child rape, sex abuse, and physical abuse. When a community has decided to separate itself from society, lives in shared barracks, dresses identically, brazenly ignores marriage laws, doesn’t bother to get birth certificates, shares religious beliefs in favor of illegal behavior, lies to authorities repeatedly about the identities and ages of their children, and then authorities find mounting evidence of illegal actions against children that mirror those religious beliefs, authorities do not have to pretend they have never seen a criminal conspiracy before.

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From today’s Fort Worth Star Telegram

Marci Hamilton

When Texas authorities entered the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch, one of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compounds, on April 3, they did so using a warrant based on calls from a person who alleged that she was an underage girl being subjected to physical and sexual abuse, including rape, at the ranch.

Once the authorities entered, they discovered pregnant underage girls, girls with more than one child, papers indicating that rampant polygamy was occurring at YFZ, and even a document involving cyanide poisoning. The authorities then intelligently decided to remove all of the children from a situation that posed obvious and serious danger to them.

Lawyers for the FLDS members have been arguing in the press that the entry and removal of the children constituted a “massive” violation of due process. Others have argued that the authorities’ actions represent the unfair targeting of one religion.

Each of these arguments is singularly misguided.

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Members of the FLDS Speak

Men at the compound, and women in custody have been interviewed for CBS News.

View the footage here.

Some stories correspond to allegations. When asked if it’s ok for a teenager to be married to a much older man:

“If that happened,” answered Sally, “she would be very much loved and taken care of. There’s no fear of anything like that.”

Notice that there’s no admission that it did happen.

Marci Hamilton believes that this will stretch out for some time. Stay tuned for her ongoing analysis.