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Child Protection in an Authoritarian Community: Culture Clash and Systemic
Weakness
Livia Bardin, M.S.W.
Abstract
Exploring allegations that Child Protective Services (CPS) in Utah and Arizona
avoid interventions in polygamous Mormon communities (PMCs), the author
discovered unusual obstructions to child protective work in this isolated,
authoritarian culture. PMC members fear and shun an “evil” outside world.
Threatened with eternal damnation for disobedience, they rank their leaders’
commands above secular law. CPS officials appeared ill-informed about key
elements of PMC culture. Concerns about accusations of religious bias and fear
of a PMC’s political power may also hamper CPS investigations. Similar patterns,
arising not from ideology, but from group structure and dynamics, are likely to
occur in thousands of similarly structured, though ideologically diverse, groups
that involve more than one million children in the United States today.
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