Abuse and crimes define polygamy

By Anita Creamer

Victoria Prunty knows women like this, wearing their long pioneer dresses and talking on TV last week about how much they miss the children that the state of Texas took from them amid allegations of abuse.

“They have no comprehension of anything other than their environment and their culture,” Prunty says. “They’re raised in very cultic dynamics, with religious programming, isolation, a lot of intimidation, a lot of male privilege, a lot of secrecy.

“They’re taught not to question anything. They fear the outside world.”

She knows, because she once lived in polygamy, too.

Traffic whooshes by on Prunty’s busy Sacramento, Calif., street. The three children who returned to California from Utah with Prunty last summer — ages 7, 14 and 18 — are in school right now. There are four more kids, including a 22-year-old daughter in the military who was wounded in Iraq last spring.

Starting fresh

Prunty, 44, is just home from working the night shift at a group home. She’s been taking classes at American River College. She’s starting fresh, once again.

In 1981, she was treasurer of the El Camino High School senior class, an athlete and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a girl from a broken home looking for answers.

She thought she found them in her husband, who convinced her that their eternal salvation depended on her welcoming a sister-wife into their home. In the late ’80s, they lived with a polygamist group in a cavern blasted into the sandstone cliffs outside Moab, Utah, heavily stocked with food and ammunition.

By 1996, she’d fled polygamy with her kids.

The first time I interviewed her, in her role as co-founder of Utah-based Tapestry Against Polygamy, which counsels and helps shelter women escaping polygamy, Prunty was returning to Sacramento for her 20th high school reunion.

In the years since, I noticed whenever her name popped up in the media — when, for example, she was interviewed for an HBO segment on polygamy, a companion piece to the “Big Love” series.

She resigned her Tapestry Against Polygamy position when she left Utah. The group had already accomplished so much, she says, including having successfully lobbied Utah to raise its marriage age from 14 to 16.

“In a way, I stepped off the battlefield,” she says.

Then came the raids on the compound in Eldorado, Texas. As I write this, a hearing is under way to decide whether 416 compound children should remain in state care.

Prunty knows women like their mothers, and she knows polygamy isn’t limited to Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through Tapestry, she aided a Muslim woman in New York as well as Southeast Asian women in Minnesota — and a young woman in Sacramento who’d married into a polygamist clan.

“This is about abuse,” Prunty says. “There are crimes within crimes,” ranging from tax evasion and welfare fraud, to incest, statutory rape and violations of child labor laws.

“Polygamy is a crime, yet it’s not prosecuted. In mainstream society, when a crime is perpetrated in a household, like a methamphetamine lab or a prostitution ring, CPS will go in and remove the children.

“Yet when a polygamist compound is raided, we think they’re being demonized for their religious beliefs.”

PR tactic

She understands that America looks with great compassion at the tearful, soft-spoken women in their prairie dresses who want their kids back: Putting them on TV is a great public relations tactic. But she doesn’t think that freedom of religion should include tolerance of child abuse.

“It’s amazing to see the selective law enforcement,” says Prunty. “If these were Muslims or an African-American group, there would probably be a very proactive approach toward enforcement. It’s really an anomaly to see Texas be so proactive here.

“I’m stunned. I’m really stunned.”

X Anita Creamer is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.