Runaway Urges Utah to Pass Bill to Fight Abuses Common in Polygamy

When she was 16, Sarah Cooke ran away from her family and their polygamous community to avoid becoming the third wife of a 45-year-old man.

On Monday, Cooke, now 18, urged Utah lawmakers to make it a felony to arrange or perform a marriage involving a girl who is not of legal age.

“I think we need to help to make it obvious to these young girls, my friends, that they aren’t obligated into these marriages,” she said.

The bill, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Ron Allen, is a small step toward tackling some of the abuses allegedly common in polygamy. It is opposed by one normally secretive polygamous clan.

“What these people are doing is not just performing an illegal marriage,” Allen said. “They are aiding and abetting child abuse.”

Allen said anecdotal evidence suggests that a handful of religious leaders may be performing hundreds of polygamous child unions each year involving girls as young as 12 and 13 years old.

Under his proposal, anyone who conducts such a marriage, or parents who let their child into such an arrangement, could be charged with a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Senate Judiciary Committee sent Allen’s bill to the full Senate for a vote, which will likely come later this week.

Plural marriage was brought to Utah by Mormon pioneers. But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly disavowed the practice in 1890, and polygamy was later banned as a condition of Utah’s statehood.

Today, there are an estimated 30,000 polygamists across the West. Yet prosecutions are rare because it is difficult to prove plural marriages, which are not legally sanctioned and often performed in secret.

Allen’s bill would make it easier to pin people down, said Douglas White, an attorney for Tapestry Against Polygamy, a group that helps women escape polygamy.

“We want the parents of this state to be accountable not just to the children but to society in general,” he said.

But in an extraordinarily rare public statement, a member of the reclusive Kingston polygamist clan argued the bill unfairly singles out polygamists because of their religious belief.

“We try to be an asset to the community, and we really feel like we haven’t had our constitutional rights,” Elden Kingston said. “I don’t feel like this is a problem in our community. I don’t think it would affect us at all. But I think it will cost a lot of money to investigate.”

Allen’s bill to make planning marriages for minors illegal wouldn’t have helped Cooke because Utah’s legal marrying age is 16. But she said it would have helped her younger cousins--one of whom was forced into an arranged marriage and now has a child at age 15.

“I think this piece of legislation will help in the long-run,” Cooke said. “They’ll figure it out. If the parents see, ‘Oh boy, I’m going to prison,’ it’s going to stop.”