Police team to probe polygamous B.C. town:
 Investigators assembled to study alleged sexual abuses in Bountiful
 
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
 
The RCMP is assembling a team to investigate allegations of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation in the polygamous community of Bountiful in southeastern British Columbia.

"Police are still working on the details of what the investigative team might look like," Attorney-General Geoff Plant said Thursday. "But the message that they've got is that what will not be satisfactory is to ask the local detachment commander to add another file to somebody who is already doing 100 other things."

Plant is also committed to doing what he can to ensure that a dedicated Crown prosecutor is assigned to work with police.

Bountiful is controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- a breakaway sect of the Mormon Church.

For two decades, women who have escaped from the community have complained of sexual abuse, the assigning of teenaged girls as concubines (so-called "celestial wives"), the high incidence of teenage mothers, and a birth rate far above the national average.

There have also been allegations that the government-supported Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School has a dropout rate far in excess of that in other provincial schools, that the students are taught blind obedience to church leaders and that their religious curriculum is racist, white-supremacist and discriminates against women.

"A 7-Eleven kind of investigation is not going to work," said Plant. "This investigation will be informed by the history and the culture of the community and be sensitive to that as well as being effective."

The Ministry of Children and Family Development is ready to assign a social worker to the RCMP team and, Plant said, it is also looking at what specialized social services might be required because of the unique challenges of dealing with victims of abuse who come from a cult-like community.

Education Minister Tom Christensen has committed to broaden the scope of its school inspections as new information becomes available.

While all of this is encouraging, it's worth tempering it all with a caution.

The community has been flourishing for 47 years. It has been the subject of these allegations before -- most recently in the late-1980s. When RCMP investigated and recommended charges be laid, the Crown prosecutor's office decided not to go ahead.

The decision to involve many ministries -- not just the police -- in the investigation suggests that the government is belatedly heeding the recommendations of a 1993 report called Life in Bountiful.

That report was commissioned by the NDP government with the promise that an interdepartmental committee would be set up to implement the recommendations. That never happened.

What the report warned was that the government must not rush in and start ripping children out of their parents' arms.

"For individuals who believe producing children is a measure of their self-worth, the consequences of being separated from their children could be disastrous," it said. "Any interventions undertaken should happen only after an extensive and coordinated investigation."

The report also strongly urged the government to review and analyze all of the files of previous interactions with the community before any investigation is started. It also said that it must be prepared to fund and implement programs to assist in the transition into the larger community for any men, women and children who wish to leave the group.

But a whole generation of children has been born since those recommendations. The community has nearly doubled in population and the community now owns nearly half of the Creston Valley and has long-term leases on land recently given to the Lower Kootenay first nations band as part of a land-claim settlement.

Plant admitted Thursday that what has got in the way of the government dealing with the problems in the past is the question of whether polygamy is legal in Canada.

The government has two legal opinions suggesting that the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom permits the practise of polygamy.

"The constitutional issue seems to have erected -- wrongly -- a barrier to further investigation of allegations that are much broader [such as] the abuse of children, forced marriage, transportation of some girls across international borders," Plant said. "But I have made it very, very clear that I do not think that constitutional issue should be an impediment to police investigation."

The attorney-general didn't mention that until recently he too had used those legal opinions as a reason not to look more closely at the allegations about Bountiful.

He also seemed to dismiss concerns raised by John Russell, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, in a letter to Premier Gordon Campbell. While Russell called for a public investigation into all of the allegations, he urged the government not to deal with what he called "the criminalization of polygamous relationships" because it could be "an unhelpful diversion."

What Plant said Thursday was: "The fact is that [polygamy] section sits there in the Criminal Code. No court has ever struck it down. And we may have to deal with it."

He added that while a constitutional test can often end up being a "multi-year distraction", "it ought not to be in this case because of the other allegations.

Polygamy is at the heart of the problems in Bountiful. It's the reason for the abuse, the statutory rape of young girls, and the casting off of young men unprepared and uneducated to cope in the broader community.

But Plant and Russell are right in one sense. After all of these years, what must finally now take precedence is fully protecting the safety and human rights of women and children in Bountiful.
 
Vancouver Sun
Originally published Friday, July 23, 2004
 
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