Systemic child abuse does not go on at a polygamous sect compound in Texas, and outsiders need to mind their own business, sect members said Monday as they continued their media campaign to be left alone to live their lives and practice their religion.

“The whole community has sort of been arrested,” a woman identified only as Janet told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira in a live interview from the sect’s 1,700-acre ranch in Eldorado, Texas. “We don’t think it’s being just at all.”

Two weeks ago, police and Texas Child Protection Services officials raided the camp after they said they received a call from a 16-year-old girl who claimed she had been forced to marry and was being physically and sexually abused.

More than 400 children were removed from the compound and are being kept separated from their parents while court-ordered DNA tests are carried out to determine which children belong to which parents and a judge determines if the children are being abused.

“We understand their concerns,” Janet said.

But she also said that if there were one case of abuse on the ranch, it doesn’t justify removing all the children.

Another sect member identified as Amy said that if there is any child abuse, it is being committed by the child protection officials who are keeping the children separated from their families.

“Since the children have been taken from their mothers, they have experienced abuse from the [state],” Amy said.

Video   Talking to polygamist parents April 21:  Hoda Kotb speaks with parents on the polygamist ranch in Texas. Carolyn Jessop, who escaped from a polygamist compound, is also interviewed. Today show

Vieira asked how she knew the children were being abused. Amy replied that she had heard reports from unspecified sources. She also cited the housing initially provided for the children in an old Army fort, where the children slept on cots and had to use portable toilets.

The women were dressed in the long, home-made, cotton, pioneer dresses favored by the sect. Women do not cut their hair, pinning it up on their heads. They also eschew makeup. A man with them identified as Fred was dressed in regular pants and a shirt.

Vieira asked the significance of the women’s dress and hairstyles.

“There’s no significance,” Janet said. “It just keeps [the hair] out of our face so we can see. It’s just a choice. We like to have long hair and we like to keep it done up.”

Few outside ties
Child protection officials have said that when the children were removed from the compound, it was the first time they had ever ridden on a bus or seen the outside world. The members of the ranch raise their own cattle and produce and seek to be entirely self-sufficient. According to media reports, they even have their own cement plant and mine the limestone needed to make cement. The limestone temple on the site is also built with limestone mined there.

“It seems to be perceived as a crime to want to live in private,” Fred said. “We just want to be left alone and it seems that’s a crime almost in America today. We’re happy here and we want to be left alone. We do not abuse our children.”

Law enforcement officials and former sect members have said girls as young as 13 are forced to marry men who may be 40 years their seniors. The sect practices polygamy as originally preached by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, in the 19^th century. The mainstream Church of Latter Day Saints renounced polygamy more than 100 years ago under pressure from the federal government. The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints is not connected to the mainstream Mormons.

The FLDS members who agreed to appear on TODAY did not speak about plural marriage. And Fred said he was unaware of underage girls being forced into marriage.

“I’ve been here off and on for four years,” Fred said. “I know of no girl 13 that’s been pregnant and I know of no one who has 22 wives. I would never do such a thing.”

But, he said, members of the community gather together just once a week for church services and then go back to their own homes and lives, and he could not speak for everyone.

Janet added that reports that members are forced to stay on the compound and not allowed contact with the outside world are false. “We’re free to leave,” she said.

The women said they will not fight a court order that both children and women on the compound be DNA tested to determine parentage.

“We are very determined to cooperate and do whatever it takes to get our children back,” said Amy. “They are desperately in need of their mothers.”

‘Escapee’ skeptical
Carolyn Jessop, who says she “escaped” from the FLDS compound on the Utah-Arizona border in order to protect her daughter from being forced into a marriage when she turned 14, said in a separate interview that Texas authorities must have found evidence of serious abuse to move a judge to remove 416 children from the compound.

“The public has to recognize, the judge did not fabricate those charges,” she said, adding that church members can deny child abuse because they define it differently.

“When I lived in that community, child abuse was a way of life,” Jessop told TODAY’s Hoda Kotb. In an interview on TODAY two weeks ago, she spoke of infants being severely spanked and subjected to a form of water torture to break their will.

“If you did not discipline a child appropriately, that was viewed as abuse,” she said Monday. “There’s a cultural difference here when they say they do not abuse. Their definition of abuse may be quite different.”

The sect member known as Dan, who spoke to Kotb separately from Jessop, said that laws have been enacted specifically targeting the sect. “We understand that laws have been fabricated to stop what we do, what our religion has been for 150 years,” he said.

He and two other church members, Leland and Janet, denied that girls were married at 14. Janet said she was married when she was almost 21. “My daughters and sons were all over 20” when they were married, she said. Five of her children, including three daughters, are in state custody. She said she talked to one son by cell phone but has not had contact with her youngest daughters since they were removed more than two weeks ago.

Janet said she fears for what her children are encountering in the world outside the fenced-in compound. “They’re exposed to everything that here on the ranch they’re not exposed to,” she said. “They’re exposed to all the drugs, the abuse, everything out there we try to keep them from. I’m really a concerned mother.”

Jessop, who has written a book about her experience entitled “Escape,” insisted that girls are regularly married off at very young ages. She pointed out that the sect’s leader, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry and have sex with her first cousin.

“It is happening and it was happening at a rampant rate when I was involved in the community,” said Jessop, who escaped before Jeffs began building the Texas ranch five years ago. None of the FLDS members interviewed by TODAY professed to have any idea where the leaders of the sect got the money to build and maintain the ranch.

Jessop said that for the past four or five years, men who live in the Arizona and Utah settlements have been required to turn $1,000 a week over to the sect from their construction jobs outside the community. She said that money built and supports the Texas ranch, which Jeffs populated with hand-picked followers.

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