Growing up as a Child of Polygamy

On 13th January 2011 Daphne Bramham wrote in the Vancouver Sun:

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Water torture of babies is one way some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints instil fear of authority, a former member testified Wednesday.

"It's quite common," Carolyn Blackmore Jessop said. She was a witness for the B.C. government in the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada's polygamy law is valid. 

"They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until they are exhausted."  It's typically done by fathers and it's called "breaking in." 

Jessop talked about the practice during her testimony in B.C. Supreme Court.

Her assertions about water torture were not challenged by FLDS lawyer Robert Wickett during cross-examination. 

Outside the courthouse, Jessop said water torture is common enough that there doesn't seem to be any shame attached to the practice.  In her cousin's baby book, there's a handwritten note by her mother noting that when her daughter was 18 months old, she was becoming quite a handful and, as a result, was being held under the tap on a regular basis. 

In court, Jessop said water torture was one of the reasons that she gave for gaining sole custody of her children after she left the group in 2003. She said her ex-husband, Merril Jessop, used it on "a lot" of his 54 children, including her own.  "Merril was very abusive," she said. 

For Bramham's full article on these abuses of children, go to 

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My Comment:

And why, you ask, does no FLDS member report such torture to the police. Because it is ingrained in them from the earliest years that they must be obedient. Obedience to God, to the church, to the prophet, to parents, to teachers - these are tenets of belief that are fundamental to their way of life.

It doesn't matter to the perpetrator that a little child is traumatized and terrorized by water torture (and I use the word advisedly) such as this. It doesn't matter to a perpetrator that siblings and wives are paralyzed by fear, anger, frustration and hopelessness. All that matters is that obedience is to be drilled into all who attempt to go their own way.

Obedience is all.