Polygamists' Kids in Their Own Private Gitmo (THE NATION) [View All]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080609/wexler

THE NATION
Law & Justice

Polygamists' Kids in Their Own Private Gitmo

A mass detention. Vague legal charges. Emotional abuse. Hostile overseers. This isn't Guantánamo--it's Texas. And the victims are children the state wants to protect.

By Richard Wexler

May 28, 2008

A little boy, maybe 3 years old, walks past row after row of cots arrayed in a sports coliseum in Texas, carrying a little pillow. "I need someone to rock me," he says. "I just want to be rocked, I want to find a rocking chair." Two adults, whose job is child protection, are following him. But they make no move to comfort him. They just follow him and write in their notebooks.

Other children, with their mothers, are jammed into a building dating to the 1800s, with no air conditioning and no indoor plumbing. Chicken pox quickly spreads; many children come down with diarrhea, some are hospitalized. At night, hostile overseers keep the women awake with their loud conversations and sometimes shine lights in their eyes.

(snip)

The physical conditions under which the women and children were held ultimately improved, but the emotional conditions deteriorated, as the children, even toddlers, were separated from their mothers.

Indefinite detention without meaningful hearings, inadequate defense counsel, standards of proof that range from low to nonexistent and, in most states, secret tribunals, may sound like the Bush Administration's war on terror. In fact, it's all standard operating procedure as part of America's war on child abuse. But mass detention is new. And now, with its raid on the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Eldorado, the State of Texas has filled that last gap--complete with their own private Guantánamo.

A Texas appeals court ruled May 22 that the state had no right to take many of the children. But the children remain scattered throughout Texas, as CPS appeals the decision.

On one point, defenders of this indefinite detention are right. The issue on which this massive detention turns is not religion--the issue is alleged rape. But the allegations against the detainees at Guantánamo also are serious and real. There, the issue also is not religion but terrorism. What's happening in Texas may be worse than Guantánamo. For starters, the victims are children.

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