Canadian polygamist sect under pressure

updated 2:09 a.m. ET May 15, 2008

LISTER, British Columbia - Fluorescent lights cast a yellow-green pall on the posted student artwork. Children's voices recite lessons behind closed doors. A group of seventh-grade girls giggle and whisper as they wander back to class.

But instead of a smiling portrait of an elected official, Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School displays a photograph of a smiling Warren Jeffs — the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who is doing time in a Utah prison, convicted of being an accomplice to rape.

The principal puts an affectionate arm around a youthful and happy second-grade teacher, a mother of 12. She's one of his wives.

The students and the teachers are dressed in hand-sewn clothes, mostly cut from the same few bolts of pastel fabric. The girls wear their hair in long, elaborate French braids, some with exaggerated pompadours above their foreheads.

School rules, posted near the front door, say: "Obey sweetly and promptly."

Canada weighing legal options
When authorities raided a thickly walled polygamist compound and took custody of 463 children in Texas last month, child welfare officials said the beliefs practiced there left girls at risk of sexual abuse and encouraged boys to become sexual perpetrators.

Many residents in this parallel community, which includes about 500 American citizens, share those same beliefs — that you take many wives and live a communal lifestyle — but prosecutors have not moved in to take action.

Yet.

British Columbia's Attorney General Wally Oppal told The Associated Press he plans to arrest someone on a polygamy charge or ask the courts to weigh in on Bountiful's legal standing within the month.

"Something must be done," he said. "I personally feel, and our government feels, that it would be inappropriate to do nothing."

Bountiful, just north of the U.S. border, is already splintered: some follow Jeffs, others follow his excommunicated former bishop Winston Blackmore. Even though many are related or have same last name, members of the two groups are not allowed to talk with each other.

Wary of outsiders — one Bountiful woman grabbed two children and ran into her home when approached by an AP reporter — these believers say authorities "kidnapped" children in Texas, confirming their worst fears about the broader world they deliberately avoid.

"It's always in the back of our mind," said Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School principal Merrill Palmer. "How would you feel if the police could come to your home and take your children? We have that hanging over us all the time."

One of his wives, teacher Aloha Palmer — wearing the standard ankle-length dress, its pink puffy sleeves covering her arms — said she now warns children that "the police, the authorities, these are people to be feared."

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