The hundreds of women and children from a Texas polygamist compound shown streaming onto school buses are the latest public face of polygamy.
But they're hardly the first.
The secretive communities of people with multiple marriages, usually religious, have gotten plenty of unwanted attention in recent years. Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, who built the compound, is awaiting trial. And the HBO show “Big Love” depicts a polygamist family in Utah.
For all that attention, it nevertheless seems that the number of people in polygamist communities has increased.
Polygamist marriages have been growing steadily since the 1800s, says Mary Batchelor, acting director of Principle Voices, a nonprofit group that advocates for Utah's decriminalizing polygamy. She says most polygamists are living within the general population.
“You wouldn't be able to tell them apart from anyone else,” she says.
There is no census data on polygamy, but Principle Voices estimates that there are 37,000 people, including children, who live in polygamy in the western United States and British Columbia. That's up from 30,000 in 2000, according to the group's informal survey of fundamentalist groups and independent fundamentalist families.
The largest known organized community is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by Jeffs. That group, with about 8,000 members, broke from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.
Most members of the fundamentalist group live in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., though they have been moving to other locations, Batchelor says. The polygamists say Joseph Smith, Mormonism's founder, was instructed to reintroduce the practice of polygamy into his family and his community.
There are also Christian and Muslim polygamists in the United States, along with emigrants from places where polygamy is common, such as certain areas of Africa and some Islamic countries.
While marriage to more than one person is illegal, enforcement varies from state to state, says Linda C. McClain, a professor at Boston University School of Law. It's the underage cases that catch the most law enforcement attention.
Jeffs is awaiting trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives. In the current West Texas case, authorities say, 400 children were taken from a compound and placed in state custody after a report of underage marriage.
Those cases are easier to prosecute than showing that a married person was living with another person with the appearance of being married, McClain says.
“I think that for the most part there's been sort of a live-and-let-live attitude, especially in Utah,” she says. But in recent years, she says, specific reports of child abuse have triggered investigations.
Most polygamists “are careful not to involve a girl under 18 in a marriage, even with parental consent,” says Utah polygamy expert John Llewellyn, author of “Polygamy's Rape of Rachael Strong: Protected Environment for Predators.” Llewellyn was a polygamist for 20 years.
In adult relationships, some women feel it's a consensual relationship, which McClain says can make it hard to get them to testify.
But that doesn't mean there is not coercion, Llewellyn says. He says girls in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints are told they will be “damned” if they do not marry older men in their community who have wives.
“It's about power and control,” says Elaine Tyler, president of The HOPE Organization, a nonprofit that works with survivors of abuse within polygamous relationships in St. George, Utah.
She says the children she sees are often uneducated – the girls take care of younger siblings and the boys work 14 hours a day. Many of the them become “Lost Boys,” kicked out of the community because of competition with older men, she says.
“It's child abuse,” she says.
Even with “normal” polygamist households, there is public contempt, McClain says, adding that it ranks up there with incestuous marriages. She ticks off problems such as domestic violence and welfare fraud.
“Not every polygamist household has all these problems,” she says. “But there is enough concern that this is harmful to women, not good for children, and harmful to boys as well.”
