Law would protect rights of moms fleeing polygamy
 
By Amanda J. Crawford
The Arizona Republic
 
When a woman flees a polygamous marriage, should her children be sent back to live with their father and his other wives? A state lawmaker from Phoenix wants to make sure they're not.

A bill to be heard Thursday in the House Human Services Committee, would block judges from giving sole or joint custody to a person with multiple spouses or those who marry someone underage.

Democratic Rep. David Lujan, an attorney with the non-profit Justice for Children, said courts sometimes treat marriages with polygamists just like other marriages, and that can be bad for the children. He says his group has worked with women who have fled Colorado City, the stronghold of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, only to have their children forced back for visitation.

Lujan said he thinks the state needs to do more to support people who flee the polygamous sect, so he's sponsoring two bills. One would change the custody rules. Another, filed Wednesday, would provide a half million dollars in funding to provide transitional services for victims.

"Part of it is building the infrastructure to give people the confidence to leave," Lujan said. They need to know that "the law is going to support them."

Lujan says there is no doubt that when an underage girl is married, often to a much older man, that what is going on is child abuse. He says he doesn't think it is safe to send children back to families engaging in that practice, known as child bigamy.

"It's two completely different worlds," he said. "It is traumatic to a child to be shuffled between them."

Flora Jessop, a former Colorado City resident and child bride who now serves as executive director of the non-profit Child Protection Project, describes how difficult joint custody can be on a child. She said she's seen the damage done.

"I think children should not have to be subjected to having to go back to the dynamics of a polygamous community," she said. "When they go there to visit they have to take off their clothes, put on their pioneer clothes. If they have earrings, they are yanked out of their ears, and while they are there the whole time they are preached at about how they are wicked for living with their mother."

Lujan said he has considered amending his bill to make it apply only to parents who engage in child bigamy, not polygamy in general, because of concerns of other lawmakers that it is targeting people based on their religion.

Still, Paul Bender, a law professor at Arizona State University, said he does not see any constitutional concerns with the bill, since polygamy is forbidden by the state constitution and since the bill allows the parent to have custody, if they can show no harm to the child.

Lujan's other bill would provide a half-million dollars to the state Department of Economic Services to provide transitional services to those who flee polygamy and the underage victims of child bigamy. Among the services he envisions: an Arizona shelter that gets victims further away from the fundamentalist sect than existing shelters in Utah.
 
azcentral.com
Originally published January 31, 2007
 
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