The main temple in the grounds of the polygamist Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas.
Photo: Tony Gutierrez

CHILDHOOD within a fundamentalist Mormon community means little education, regular beatings, rigorously enforced household duties and, for girls, an arranged marriage in their teens culminating in a lifetime of subservience, say two sisters who fled that life.

"My father had four wives yet he couldn't keep his hands off his daughters," Rena Mackert, one of 31 siblings, said yesterday. "One of my sisters had five sons, all sodomised by their father."

Referring to her own experience, Rena's sister, Kathleen Mackert, said: "I was required to perform oral sex on my father when I was seven, and it escalated from there.

"The abuse was rampant. Physical, sexual, emotional — we experienced all three. Some of it at the hands of the men, some of it at the hands of the wives."