'Everything about the community is so unbelievable, from the fact that we fund the schools, we provide their health care.

'To me it is so offensive that nothing's been done,' said Daphne Branham, who has published a book about Canada's polygamous renegade LDS sect. No charges were brought, but the legal age of sexual consent in Canada increased to 16 from 14 on May 1. As part of a three-year review launched in 2004, detectives spent three months in the community. In repeated investigations, the more troubling questions of sexual abuse, human trafficking and forced marriages also have been investigated. A national poll last month found nearly two-thirds of Canadians want Bountiful residents who break the law by practicing polygamy to be prosecuted.īut two Canadian laws stand in contradiction: Polygamy is banned, and religious freedoms are firmly protected. The pressure has been growing since the Texas raid. One of his wives, teacher Aloha Palmer - wearing the standard ankle-length dress, its pink puffy sleeves covering her arms - said she now warns children that 'the police, the authorities, these are people to be feared.'īountiful residents have reason to worry: Just like in Texas, polygamy is illegal in Canada.īut instead of responding to a direct complaint of sexual abuse, Oppal would be reacting to two decades of unanswered pressure that the Canadian government do something about these families who practice plural marriages with impunity. 'How would you feel if the police could come to your home and take your children? We have that hanging over us all the time.'

'It's always in the back of our mind,' said Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School principal Merrill Palmer. Wary of outsiders - one Bountiful woman grabbed two children and ran into her home when approached by an AP reporter - these believers say authorities 'kidnapped' children in Texas, confirming their worst fears about the broader world they deliberately avoid. Even though many are related or have the same last name, members of the two groups are not allowed to talk with each other. border, is already splintered: some follow Jeffs, others follow his excommunicated former bishop Winston Blackmore. 'I personally feel, and our government feels, that it would be inappropriate to do nothing.'īountiful, just north of the U.S. Many residents in this parallel community, which includes about 500 American citizens, share those same beliefs - that you take many wives and live a communal lifestyle - but prosecutors have not moved in to take action.īritish Columbia's Attorney General Wally Oppal told The Associated Press he plans to arrest someone on a polygamy charge or ask the courts to weigh in on Bountiful's legal standing within the month. When authorities raided a thickly walled polygamist compound and took custody of 463 children in Texas last month, child welfare officials said the beliefs practiced there left girls at risk of sexual abuse and encouraged boys to become sexual perpetrators. School rules, posted near the front door, say: 'Obey sweetly and promptly.' The girls wear their hair in long, elaborate French braids, some with exaggerated pompadours above their foreheads. The students and the teachers are dressed in hand-sewn clothes, mostly cut from the same few bolts of pastel fabric. The principal puts an affectionate arm around a youthful and happy second-grade teacher, a mother of 12. A group of seventh-grade girls giggle and whisper as they wander back to class.īut instead of a smiling portrait of an elected official, Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School displays a photograph of a smiling Warren Jeffs - the leader of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, who is doing time in a Utah prison, convicted of being an accomplice to rape.

Children's voices recite lessons behind closed doors. LISTER, British Columbia - Fluorescent lights cast a yellow-green pall on the posted student artwork.

Winston blackmore investigator