CHICAGO (AFP) — Child welfare workers were struggling Thursday to find foster care facilities for some 437 children removed from a polygamist sect in Texas amid allegations of widespread sexual abuse.
The sect's reclusive practices -- which shunned modern society and created large, complex family groups of one father and multiple mothers and children -- are further complicating efforts to place the children in foster care.
"It's going to be very important not to expose them all at once to what you call mainstream culture and that's why we're keeping them in groups," said Texas Child Protective Services spokesman Chris Van Deusen.
"There are foods they're used to eating so we're working with the facilities to provide them," Van Deusen told AFP.
"They've been allowed to worship and pray and sing and that will continue in the foster placements as well. They'll also be able to continue to dress as they did."
The children will also be educated in their foster care facilities rather than be sent to public schools.
While the department is trying to keep siblings together to ease the transition, sorting out the family relationships has been extremely difficult.
The children and parents were given cheek swabs earlier this week but DNA test results are not expected for a couple weeks.
Some 138 children aged five to 17 have been sent to facilities across the state since a judge ruled last week that all the children on the compound run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) should be placed in temporary state custody.
Child Protective Services is working to find appropriate facilities for the nearly 300 more who remain in a temporary shelter set up in San Angelo, Texas.
Most of the mothers who have been staying with the children will not be allowed to follow them to foster care. They will, however, be given visitation rights.
Some 18 adult women with children under a year old will be allowed to stay with them and underage mothers will not be separated from their children.
The raid was sparked by a series of desperate calls by someone who identified herself as a 16-year-old girl and said she was being held against her will on the ranch, was frequently beaten by her 50-year-old husband and was pregnant again eight months after giving birth to her first child.
Police are investigating whether the call really came from a woman in Colorado who has been convicted of making false calls to abuse hotlines in the past, local media reported.
The call was used to obtain a search warrant of the ranch and officials said they saw evidence of widespread sexual abuse when they arrived.
They said girls were being "groomed" to accept sex with their significantly older "spiritual husbands" as soon as they hit puberty and boys were being indoctrinated to perpetuate the cycle of abuse.
The FLDS split from the mainstream Mormon church when polygamy was banned. The group holds that plural marriage is a way to get to heaven.
Mainstream Mormons now excommunicate members who engage in polygamy and reject any connection with the FLDS.
The ranch was purchased in 2003 and built by Warren Jeffs, the self-described prophet of the group, who was convicted last year by a Utah court on two counts of being an accomplice to rape, relating to the marriage of a schoolgirl against her will to a cousin.
He is currently serving a 10-years-to-life prison sentence and is awaiting trial on similar charges in Arizona.
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