Salt Lake City -- One of the first things
Caroline Cooke did after she escaped from her polygamist community
was cut her knee-length hair to an above-the-shoulder bob. She
also traded her full-length dresses for sleeveless shirts and
shorts.
They were radical and symbolic moves for the
15-year-old girl who walked away from her family and religion,
which encourages pioneer-style long hair and long dresses for
women.
Cooke left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the country's largest
polygamist groups, four months ago because she feared she soon
would be married to a man three times her age who already had more
than a dozen wives.
"I just feel free. I get to listen to music, to
watch TV, to look on the Internet. For the first time in my life I
get my own room," said Cooke, who now lives with her uncle's
family in rural southwestern Colorado. The situation of girls such
as Cooke has gotten more attention as a result of the case against
polygamist Tom Green, who does not belong to the fundamentalist
church. Green, 52, was convicted in May of keeping five wives in
Utah's first polygamy prosecution in nearly 50 years.
Green, 52, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.
He could get up to 25 years in prison. He is also awaiting trial
on charges of child rape stemming from his marriage to a young
woman in Mexico, apparently when she was 13. She is pregnant with
her seventh child.
Members of the Mormon church brought polygamy
to the West when they settled Utah more than 150 years ago. The
church renounced polygamy in the 1890s and now excommunicates
those who practice it. But some groups and individuals - including
the FLDS church - say they are adhering to early Mormon tradition.
Estimates put the number of polygamists in the
West at 30,000. Life within the closed FLDS fundamentalist
community is strict, and women have little say about their
futures, Cooke said. Almost all the teen-age girls in the group
are married at 16 to men much older.
Cooke said FLDS leaders found out about her
secret 18-year-old boyfriend, who was promptly kicked out of the
group. But for girls, it is harder to leave. "They want as many
girls as they can get," she said.
Cooke has not been in school since she was in
sixth grade and has only been educated in schools run by
polygamists, she said. Now she nervously awaits her first day in
public school on Sept. 1.
She said she has no regrets. However, her
decision has meant estrangement from her polygamist parents and 26
brothers and sisters. While Cooke adjusts to her new life, another
15-year-old girl is making her case in Salt Lake juvenile court to
leave the same polygamist community.
In addition, an older sister of 14-year-old
Ruby Jessop is claiming the teen is being held against her will
inside the FLDS community in Utah. Flora Jessop said her sister
was forced into a marriage with her stepbrother.
The FLDS church, governed by Rulon Jeffs, is
said to have as many as 12,000 members. It is headquartered in the
Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy, but its members dominate the
remote Stateline towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
Scott Berry, the group's Salt Lake City-based
attorney, was out of town and unavailable for comment, a secretary
said.
Todd Minchey, a regional director with the Utah
Division of Child and Family Services, said that when girls leave
the tightlipped polygamist communities, it is rare that the
outside world hears about it. He thinks these cases are getting
more attention now because of the Green case.
Cooke said being a part of the polygamist
community was like living in a foreign country, though she spent
the past six years in Salt Lake City.
Diana Hollis, an investigator in the Utah
attorney general's criminal division whose job is to look into
these closed societies, has childhood memories of trying to peer
inside a neighbor's polygamist household.
"I'd look through the knotholes in the fence
that surrounded the home and say, 'I wish those kids would come
out and play with us,"' she said. "Who would have thought I would
still be looking through the knotholes?"
