Forced to marry a 50-year-old with six wives when just 18 … One woman's harrowing tale of escaping the Texas polygamist sect ............By CAROLYN JESSOP .......... Watching the TV this week I wept as pictures were broadcast from an isolated part of Texas. I saw 416 children – from infants to teenagers – and 133 women being taken into protective police custody. They were driven away from a place they called "home" – a 1,700-acre desert compound run by the polygamist sect once controlled by their "prophet", Warren Jeffs. Scroll down for more … Carolyn Jessop was hunted down like 'prey' after she escaped with her eight children The reason I was crying was simple – those images of women wearing ankle-length dresses and holding the hands of bright-eyed children brought back terrible memories. For I was once one of them. Many of those teenage girls were pregnant and some already had babies. Few of the 416 youngsters brought out of the sect in the Texas desert knew their full names, birthday or even their own mothers. Some had been beaten so badly they had suffered broken bones. Girls, some as young as 12 and 13, had been expected to have sex with much older men. But as the freed youngsters played with donated toys, social workers claimed the shadow of fear was finally lifting for the children. Scroll down for more … Rescued: Female members of sect are escorted onto a school bus in Eldorado, Texas Relieved: A group of women church members tearfully embrace after being reunited at Fort Concho, Texas No one knows better than I do what the horrifying reality of life was like at the Yearning for Zion ranch near Eldorado, south of Dallas – I was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Only I was lucky enough to escape. I came from six generations of polygamists who formed the 10,000-strong FLDS, as we called it. The organisation was part of the Mormon church, but broke away to defend the rights of its male members to have more than one wife – a practice the Mormons stopped at the turn of the last century. When I was young, I remember being looked at with scorn when we went into the town in our long pastel dresses. The residents called us "polygs" and sometimes threw rocks at us, but I didn't mind. It proved to my young and naive mind that all the people in the outside world were evil. At the age of 18, in 1986, I was made to marry a 50-year-old stranger – a fellow member of the cult – because that was expected of every young woman in our community. It was deemed perfectly natural: the leader, our prophet, decided whom you should marry and you were supposed to do it without hesitation. Except I did hesitate. When I was forced to marry, it was a turning point for me – a moment which made me question everything I had been taught. But so strong had my indoctrination been, I still lived by the tenets of our faith, ignoring the questioning voice in my mind. So, during the next 15 years, I bore my husband, Merril, who had six other wives, no fewer than eight children – five boys and three girls. I had no alternative than to obey his demands – including treating him like a god. If I refused, or failed in my tasks, I was punished. My every move was watched, and I was never allowed my own money. I knew I was being controlled and it frightened me. My sister (also a member of the FLDS) and I used to have a grim joke: "Don't drink the punch" – a reference to the mass suicide of 900 members of the cult The People's Temple by drinking a poison punch under the orders of the Rev Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. We were terrified it might happen to us. Indeed, ever since Jeffs inherited the leadership of our cult from his father in 2002, he'd been preaching that he was Jesus Christ incarnate.
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