The stories you gave me to read were about kids who didn’t follow the rules and were given an opportunity to work within the community or to leave. This is very different scenario from one in which a large percentage of males are ‘expelled at 18′. It doesn’t connote systemic abuse to enforce established community rules. If you were surprised to hear about 15- and 16-year-olds abandoned by their parents, then I guess your high school was a little nicer than mine.

The baby grave thing is creepy on the face of it, and may, in fact, provide evidence of a systemic favoritism toward females. Or it could be that in a culture that shuns birth control and starts women conceiving as early as possible that a relatively high proportion of still births and miscarriages occur. Again, without documentation (which doesn’t appear to exist) we don’t have a whole lot to go on.

We do know that there are 72 kids, presumably boys, from the YFZ group that were shipped up to Boys Ranch up near Amarillo. If you presume that only boys were sent and that no boys were sent anywhere else, you get an 85% bias toward girls. I don’t think diet alone could generate that sort of disparity, so the likelihood that the graves will hold the offset in males does seem more likely — if our assumptions about the male population are correct. The Boys Ranch number could simply be that of the teenaged boys, in which case, 72 is probably a pretty reasonable number. Or it could be that those are the boys in certain categories of defendants, in which case we’ve got no clue how many there are in total.

In any case, if infanticide is one of the crimes we can hold against these folks, even that is still a very different problem than abandoning helpless teenagers like unwanted pets.

The CNN article seems to be talking about someone who did leave at 18 (21 now, left 3 years ago, when his father was kicked out.)

The Boston.com article covers another 16 year old.

The 85% figure is one that Brooke Adams, the Salt Lake Tribune reporter that Grits for Breakfast favors, was comfortable posting on her blog. Have you seen figures that number the boys versus the girls collected by CPS?

And there are, indeed, questions about unmarked infant graves in in the Hildale/Colorado city area: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0503/S00014.htm

“Most unsettling is the revelation of countless numbers of unmarked baby graves in the canyonlands attached to the FLDS polygamy cult headquartered on the Utah-Arizona border. Local residents call it “Babyland” and law enforcement’s response to human rights activists questioning the graves has been that unmarked graves are not illegal.”

Those graves are in Arizona/Utah, however, so not much risk that Texas would dig them up to count male versus female bodies.

Then again, anti-FLDS Flora Jessop has formally requested that the FBI investigate why the graveyard has over 50% of the interred bodies as small enough to be that of children. Infant deaths? Perhaps the FBI is investigating this.

The authorities in Texas at least admit that there have been federal search warrants, but do not elaborate on what may be the topic for the search: http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695269233,00.html

Although it may be crass for that community to kick out members without assistance, but it is also not entirely distinct from what happens in many mainstream families and churches in America. It’s not illegal for a parent to wash their hands of their wayward children after 18, and there’s no requirement for a community long tormented by delinquent spawn to provide assistance or aid when they are finally free of their abuse.

I would understand a coordinated effort to deliberately weed out “bad seeds” as an entirely rational form of group self-preservation. What I don’t see is a conspiracy to fiddle with the gender balance to provide more fresh meat for old men. That’s exploitative nonsense. The 85% figure is as reliable as the one that said that all of the 12-year-olds coming out of the YFZ ranch were pregnant. Straight from CPS, I was told that was — a friend’s sister’s cousin worked there an that’s what everyone said.

If you’re going to bias your population for a specific gender, you usually root out the problem before you’ve invested 18 years in rearing — I would look for evidence of infanticide if I was going to try to make this point.

All of this is so very weird, and the worst part seems to be our expectation of extreme freakiness in any situation.

And another: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/07/lost.boys/index.html

Third report, from 2005: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/19/polygamys_lost_boys_expelled_from_only_life_they_knew/

And Warren Jeffs’ nephew Brent has pressed charges against Warren: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4679825&page=1

Brooke Adams mentions that 85% of the children in custody are female: http://blogs.sltrib.com/plurallife/2008/04/why-more-girls.htm

Not anymore.

State officials searched for a week for evidence of sexual abuse and rounded up all the children into mass shelters. As of Friday, the children had all been bused to foster group homes hundreds of miles away; only nursing infants still have their mothers with them.

[source]

Do you have any references to an article or a YouTube where a verifiable FLDS member describes this active culling of the pack? I’m not saying that you’re responsible for proving this to me, but I can’t really argue your point one way or the other because I don’t know what the motivations for such bizarre behavior would be.

Without further information, I’m afraid that I would have to go with keeping the boys at home with a bunch of freaky Mormons until exile as being superior to crapping them through the CPS blender and then ejecting them into society when they turn 18.

I don’t think that polygamy, while illegal in the state of texas, is something CPS is investigating. What they are concerned with is sexual molestation/rape/abuse of minors.

Unfortunately CPS generally does get a bad rap particularly for situations like this. Someone puts in a call reporting child abuse, CPS must investigate. They can’t not investigate. Sadly too many calls are put in falsely by malicious or, yes, overly self-righteous people. In any case, CPS can’t not respond.

Not all children are being sent to foster care. There are in fact some who are staying in custody of their mother.

This is a muddy situation from all sides, for FDLS, for CPS, for Texas Rangers, everyone. All we have to go on is what is printed in the media.