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That question is being asked once again in the wake of the huge bust at the West Texas compound of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Last weekend, child welfare investigators and law enforcement personnel liberated teenage mothers and underage girls who said they had been forced to marry. Over 400 children have been taken into state custody. The raid, prompted by a report that a 16-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted at the compound, uncovered rampant and systematic emotional and physical abuse of children and their mothers.
A FLDS colony exists at Bountiful, BC, where polygamy has been an open secret for decades, yet provincial governments have refused to prosecute. The events in Texas have renewed pressure on Attorney-General Wally Oppal to get off his duff.
The Attorney-General of British Columbia should stop wasting time and start prosecuting individuals in the fundamentalist Mormon community of Bountiful, a former member of the polygamous sect said Tuesday.Debbie Palmer, who was married off at the age of 15 to a 55-year-old man, said she does not understand why the province keeps studying the constitutionality of the federal law that forbids polygamy rather than testing it by enforcement.
Rather than enforce the law against polygamy, Mr Oppal has elected to refer the Bountiful file to, not one, but two successive outside lawyers for advice. Both opposed prosecution; rather, they advised court references to assess the law's constitutionality. Oppal says he favours a more aggressive approach, but has not actually done anything. Certainly, he is dithering; he may even be stalling.
Don Stuart, a professor of law at Queen's University, said he was puzzled by what was going on in British Columbia."I'm not quite sure why it's necessary to refer a normal law enforcement discretion to a committee," Prof. Stuart said.
"Prosecutors are not supposed to proceed if there's no reasonable prospect of success. If there's an evidentiary problem of getting the proper complainant you can understand why they're not proceeding," said Prof. Stuart. "But assuming there's a possibility of getting the evidence I would have thought that referring the matter to a court for a constitutional reference seems rather odd. Especially if the likelihood here is that people are being hurt."
Ms Palmer says that she was forced to marry an older man who already had five wives. After he died, she was “reassigned” to another polygamous man who abused her. She finally managed to escape with her eight children.
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