FFWD REW

Polygamous pratfalls

Journalist Daphne Bramham exposes Canada’s Mormon sect

In the late afternoon on April 3 2008 Texas Rangers raided the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ (FLDS) 680-hectare compound in response to a 16-year-old girl’s reports of sexual and physical abuse. Within a week the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had 416 children and 139 adult women in state custody. The polygamist sect rooted in isolation and secrecy suddenly found itself thrust into the limelight.

While many news outlets scrambled to cover this story of child brides and sexual abuse veteran Canadian reporter Daphne Bramham has been following the FLDS on both sides of the border for many years. Her book The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada’s Polygamous Mormon Sect (RandomHouse Canada 464 pp.) is a fascinating attempt to unravel the web of deception that shrouds the breakaway sect.

Fast Forward: You come from a journalism background. Was that your first introduction to the story of the FLDS?

Daphne Bramham: I got an e-mail from a reader… it was all in caps one of those weird e-mails. [It said] “Why don’t you write about Bountiful B.C. because they are trafficking women back and forth between Canada and the United States to become concubines of old men.” I sent her an upper and lower case e-mail back and said I don’t know anything about it why don’t you tell me? Since then I’ve written more than a hundred columns about Bountiful.

Was it the type of thing that the further you dug into it the further there was to go? Not to say the book is convoluted but I can’t imagine trying to tease out the connections between these closed societies to reveal their relationships.

It’s a very complicated story. You know quite often in journalism you get simple stories and this is a very rich story. The obvious story of it is about the child brides about these young women. But the reason I ended up writing the book is because the story is so complicated. It’s not only about child brides; it’s not only about sexual abuse. It’s about why we let it happen.

You are clearly not objective on this issue. You think this is wrong and you write from that point of view.

In a story like this I don’t think there’s an “on the one hand on the other hand.” I don’t think you can do it. I’m a serious journalist: I was the economics reporter for the Asia-Pacific beat I was a political reporter and all of a sudden I found myself writing like Geraldo or something. This is the stuff of tabloids but it’s real. It’s not like alien babies. This is really going on.

You do a good job of keeping the book grounded and not falling into the trap of making it lurid.

I tried not to be too outraged about this because it seems to me that the facts speak for themselves. I want people to think through what it means to create a multicultural multi-ethnic multi-religious society and how we’re going to do that. When I talk to immigrants who come to Canada they say “I chose Canada because you have human rights you have equality rights you have the rule of law.” In the case of the fundamentalist Mormons these are all things we have denied. We haven’t enforced the law. We haven’t looked after or protected their human rights.

Why do you think that this situation has continued unhindered in the United States and Canada for the past 50 years? Why don’t we enforce the laws we have?

Common sense would say that what’s going on there isn’t right. But we seem to have these big holes in the law that we can’t seem to find a way to do something with it or our politicians don’t have the will to do it. I think there’s sort of a combination of those two things. I think ordinary people if they hear this story all they say is ‘Why is this allowed to continue?’

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