Background

Linda Walker and Flora Jessop, the founder and Executive Director of the Child Protection Project respectively, both hail from Mormon backgrounds. Flora Jessop was raised in a fundamentalist community practicing polygamy, and forced and child marriage, and fought to escape to a life where she would be guaranteed the right to bodily integrity and self-determination. Flora’s negative experiences dealing with unsympathetic local authorities and law enforcement officials led her to commit herself to actively campaign for justice for women and children facing abuse in polygamous communities in Arizona and Utah.

Linda Walker, a descendant of early Mormon polygamy, aims to raise awareness about the problematic doctrine and the extensive human and civil rights abuses related to modern day polygamy. She hopes that the federal government of the USA will stop giving amnesty to practicing polygamists and ensure justice is provided to victims and survivors of child abuse, incest, and related diseases.

Mormon fundamentalism (also called fundamentalist Mormonism) is a belief in the validity of selected fundamental aspects of Mormonism as taught and practiced in the nineteenth century, particularly during the administration of Brigham Young, an early president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Mormon fundamentalists seek to uphold tenets and practices no longer held by mainstream Mormons (members of the LDS Church) such as the practice of plural marriage, and in some fundamentalist sects it is considered acceptable for an older man to marry underage girls as soon as they attain puberty.

The Project

CPP researches how institutions, especially churches, ignore child abuse reporting requirements; and thus cause unnecessary suffering and pain to children and families. The project calls for religious institutions to be good corporate citizens because their mandate as tax-exempt beneficial, charitable organizations requires that children entrusted to their care be safe.

CPP advocates for prosecution of polygamy and the secret crimes that often accompany it such as incest, wife and child abuse, forced and underage marriages, and welfare and tax fraud. Where educators, members of the clergy (whether trained clergy or lay clergy), lawmakers and law enforcement personnel are, themselves, engaged in these crimes or are complicit in ignoring or hiding the evidence of these crimes or preventing the prosecution of criminals, CPP advocates their removal from office and, if appropriate, prosecution.

They promote the education of the members of currently polygamous groups and descendants of earlier polygamous groups about the genetic dangers of the almost unprecedented practices of endogamous (within the family) polygamy.

CPP also advocates holding institutions that promulgate these harmful practices, justified in the name of religion, civilly and financially liable for the damages inflicted upon the victims of institutionalized abuse and forced inbreeding.

For more  information see: www.childpro.org