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The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada’s Polygamous Mormon Sect
Daphne Bramham's far-reaching and essential The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect (Random House $32.95) not only reveals how polygamy and sex with minors have been perpetuated, with minimal prosecution, on both sides of the 49th parallel, for decades.
It also examines how young men and boys are victimized by Mormon polygamy almost as much as their female counterparts.
Because leaders take numerous wives, the sect's under-educated males are often unable to marry and are exploited for cheap labour, or ostracized. The exposé estimates fundamentalist Mormons under-pay their employees by 40% in comparison to their neighbours. Some Mormons believe a man needs a minimum of three wives to get into heaven.
As Bramham admits, she has picked up the story from where Debbie Palmer's memoir of her escape from Bountiful left off. Co-written with self-publisher Dave Perrin, Palmer's Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy (Dave's Press, $28.95) won the Vancity Book Prize for best book pertaining to women's issues in 2006.
Herself the oldest of 47 children, Palmer was forced to become the sixth wife of the community's leader when she was 15. Assigned to two other older men after that, she fled in 1988 and has since been profiled on CBC's Fifth Estate.
Debbie Palmer's memoir is dedicated to her own eight children's "unspeakable horrors before I brought them out."; Among many others who contributed to her extensive research, Bramham clearly credits Palmer as well as B.C. author Jancis Andrews in her foreword.
"Except for an angry email from Jancis Andrews in April, 2004,"; writes Bramham, "I would never have written about Bountiful at all. Jancis was responding to a series of columns I'd written for the Vancouver Sun on the illegal trafficking of Asian women and children into Canada.
"'Why didn't I write about Canadian girls being trafficked to become concubines to polygamist men?', she angrily demanded.";
Accordingly, Bramham, an award-winning columnist for the Vancouver Sun, delves into the private lives of Mormon leaders Winston Blackmore-the Bountiful, B.C.-based self-appointed prophet who has had more than 25 wives and sired more than 100 children; Warren Jeffs-who accumulated more than 70 wives in Salt Lake City in the 1990s prior to his recent arrest and convictions; and his father Rulon Jeffs-the patriarch who named the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Secret Lives 978-0-307-35588-1; Keep Sweet 0-9687943-3-5
[BCBW 2008]
It also examines how young men and boys are victimized by Mormon polygamy almost as much as their female counterparts.
Because leaders take numerous wives, the sect's under-educated males are often unable to marry and are exploited for cheap labour, or ostracized. The exposé estimates fundamentalist Mormons under-pay their employees by 40% in comparison to their neighbours. Some Mormons believe a man needs a minimum of three wives to get into heaven.
As Bramham admits, she has picked up the story from where Debbie Palmer's memoir of her escape from Bountiful left off. Co-written with self-publisher Dave Perrin, Palmer's Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy (Dave's Press, $28.95) won the Vancity Book Prize for best book pertaining to women's issues in 2006.
Herself the oldest of 47 children, Palmer was forced to become the sixth wife of the community's leader when she was 15. Assigned to two other older men after that, she fled in 1988 and has since been profiled on CBC's Fifth Estate.
Debbie Palmer's memoir is dedicated to her own eight children's "unspeakable horrors before I brought them out."; Among many others who contributed to her extensive research, Bramham clearly credits Palmer as well as B.C. author Jancis Andrews in her foreword.
"Except for an angry email from Jancis Andrews in April, 2004,"; writes Bramham, "I would never have written about Bountiful at all. Jancis was responding to a series of columns I'd written for the Vancouver Sun on the illegal trafficking of Asian women and children into Canada.
"'Why didn't I write about Canadian girls being trafficked to become concubines to polygamist men?', she angrily demanded.";
Accordingly, Bramham, an award-winning columnist for the Vancouver Sun, delves into the private lives of Mormon leaders Winston Blackmore-the Bountiful, B.C.-based self-appointed prophet who has had more than 25 wives and sired more than 100 children; Warren Jeffs-who accumulated more than 70 wives in Salt Lake City in the 1990s prior to his recent arrest and convictions; and his father Rulon Jeffs-the patriarch who named the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Secret Lives 978-0-307-35588-1; Keep Sweet 0-9687943-3-5
[BCBW 2008]
Submitted on June 3, 2008 in By David.
