"Breaking the Baby"

[Ilsa]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24009286/

Carolyn Jessop, who was one of the wives of a polygamist-sect leader, talks with TODAY's Matt Lauer about life on a fundamentalist compound.

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A polygamous community in Texas that follows the teaching of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints practices pedophilia, torture and child abuse under the guise of a religion, according to a woman who escaped the sect with her eight children five years ago.


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The alleged control began in infancy.

“The method he would use with infants was a form of water torture,” Jessop said of her former husband. “He would spank the baby until it was screaming out of control, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of running water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeatedly. Sometimes, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry anymore. This method he called ‘breaking them.’”

To a child, the abuse becomes normal, she said, and resistance becomes unthinkable to most. “With this level of mind control, it’s something you’re born into and it’s generational. The babies born into this, they don’t stand a chance from the beginning,” she said.

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My God. How could a mother listen to and watch her baby being tortured like that without trying to take the baby and run away? it must have been the conditioning.

[gateley]

1. Someone posted that

this compound -- and others -- are out in the middle of nowhere. No place to go, no way to get out. And as you say, the conditioning --

I can't imagine it.

[Ilsa]

2. Yes, very isolated. In summer, it would be like walking for miles

through a desert. Horrible.

[kestrel91316]

10. And presumably no maps for them to use to try to navigate out of there.

Heck, the youngest ones probably didn't even know there was anywhere else to BE.

[varelse]

3. Smells like child abuse to me

“The way he controlled me was by being violent to my children,” she told Lauer. “If I did something that he didn’t like, my children paid, and they paid a big price. He would hurt them. If he would have been hurting me, I probably would not have conformed. But when you go after a woman’s child, that’s one thing that will put a woman on her knees quickly.”

:puke:

[gateley]

4. BIg time --

Did they get the guy they're looking for yet?

[Ilsa]

7. I think they arrested someone else, but I can't remember the man's name. nt

[alstephenson]

5. Water-boarding infants???

What the hell is the matter with these people? Absolutely disgusting - I feel sick to my stomach.

[Ilsa]

6. It made me ill as well. To me, this says everything about who these

"men" are, and what lengths they'll go to to control the women and children.

[MuseRider]

8. "To a child, the abuse becomes normal, she said, and resistance becomes unthinkable to most. "

That is how it works. Sad but true.

[aquart]

9. Well, that's why WE waterboard, isn't it?