48 Children Rescued From Ranch
Law enforcement officials removed a total of forty eight abused children from a Texas ranch Thursday night (April 3, 2008). The children's ages ranged from as young as six months to seventeen years. After receiving complaints of the abuse of a sixteen year old girl, officers obtained search warrants to investigate the ranch. However, what they ended up finding was much worse than they had anticipated.
The "ranch" is actually a polygamist community, organized by Warren Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Fifty two year old Warren Jeffs is a convicted felon. Currently, he is serving a ten year to life sentence for being an accomplice to the rape of a fourteen year old girl. He is also awaiting trial in the state of Arizona, where he is against eight charges of sexual conduct with a minor, conspiracy, as well as incest.
This church has many critics who are concerned with women being objectified by the churches beliefs. They state that marriages are arranged for girls at ages as young as thirteen, and that women and children are passed on as possessions from one person to the next.
The ranch houses at least 400 members of the church, who moved from establishments in Arizona and Utah. CNN has reported on the visual layout of the ranch, saying that it contains a large temple, a housing complex, a school, a dairy factory as well as a concrete mill. According to a local newspaper, the complex is surrounded by a large fence with over 150 buildings inside.
In other locations, members of this particular church choose to publicly practice polygamy, however residents of the Texas establishment are secluded from the rest of their surroundings. Residents hardly ever leave the ranch to go to the nearest town, Eldarado, Texas, which is only four miles south.
In order to remove the children from the ranch, two buses were needed to provide transportation which were borrowed from a local church. Child welfare investigators are still working on the case to determine what kind of treatment the children were receiving. A total of eighteen girls were removed due to abuse and neglect, the other thirty children were taken as a precaution to remove them from a dangerous situation.
Due to the ongoing investigation, many of the specific details cannot be released at this time. Darrell Aza, a protective-services spokesman stated that "The actions we've taken today have nothing to do with religion or lifestyle. The pure interest is in protecting children from abuse and neglect. That's what we have done."
