Ex-sect members escape polygamy, but not pain

From CNN.COM:

(CNN) -- Long after she escaped a polygamist Colorado City, Arizona, community in 1986, Flora Jessop found another way to escape -- cocaine.

"It killed the pain. It killed the hurt," she said. "I didn't have to hurt so bad because I missed everything I knew."

Once she fled the fundamentalist Mormon sect, she was an apostate. She believed God hated her. Her parents and siblings thought she was wicked. Worst of all, she knew she was damned to hell, Jessop said.

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Religion -- the reason these women say they stay -- is also used to validate the brainwashing, and in some cases, physical abuse employed to keep women and children submissive, said Marci Hamilton, author of "Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect its Children."

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(full article)