Editing Placement marriage (section)

== During Warren Jeffs's Presidency  ==

There were suspicions that [[Warren Jeffs]] may have done away with the volunteer feature for young women who didn’t come to him and say they were ready to be married.<ref name="Watson"/>  Underage marriage and marriages between close relatives has apparently been common in the FLDS Church. Arranged marriages of young girls to much older men, whom they may not even know, are not out of the ordinary. It is also common for these men to be relatives who already have wives. One writer believes [[incest]] is permitted and considered doctrine in a large number of groups.<ref name="Moore">Moore-Emmett, Andrea. God’s Brothel. San Francisco: Pince-nez Press, 2004.</ref> However, most fundamentalist Mormons deny this and say they neither permit nor practice incest.{{fact|date=December 2016}}

=== Wives of excommunicated men ===
In October 2002 the FLDS announced Warren Jeffs as the new president of the FLDS Church. Under Warren Jeffs's leadership, many male members were [[excommunicated]]. The wives, along with children and sometimes property, of these men are reassigned to other "more faithful" men. Some wives were reassigned more than once.<ref name="Watson"/> If the wives did not agree to do as Jeffs instructed, they were also told to leave.<ref name="Watson"/> Andrea Moore-Emmett, author of ''God's Brothel'' wrote this about placement marriages: “Whether a woman is already married or not, “releasings” (divorces) and “sealings” (marriages) from one man to another man are at the whim of the leader”.<ref name="Moore"/>

=== Moving away from Colorado City/Hildale ===
Within a year of becoming president, Warren Jeffs began to send small numbers of members to other places outside of Colorado City and Hildale–such as the site in Texas.

=== Legal conflicts ===

==== Incest and child marriages ====
Instances such as this can lead to problems with the law.  One man in a small group of Mormon fundamentalists called the Latter Day Church of Christ, founded by [[Charles W. Kingston]], was recently{{when?|date=June 2017}} "convicted of incest with teenage wives amid allegations of forced marriages and child abuse".<ref name="Driggs">Driggs, Ken. “Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: A History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s.” Dialogue 38, (2005):65-95</ref> Child marriages in the past have been common in certain areas. In the one community, young girls were marrying as young as 14 years old.<ref name="Bennion">Bennion Janet. ''Women of Principle''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.</ref>

==== Kidnapping ====
During the 1944 raid some members were charged with kidnapping and violations of the [[Mann Act]] in connection with taking under-age plural wives across state lines. Fifteen men were prosecuted for unlawful cohabitation with their plural wives and were then sentenced to serve time in the Utah State Prison; nine more were sentenced to federal prison time. [[Charles Zitting]] and David Darger were charged with both federal and state sentences.<ref name="Driggs"/>

=== Free agency ===
The idea of [[Agency (LDS Church)|free agency]] is a fundamental principle of the original LDS church, and is also considered an important part of Mormon Fundamentalist doctrine. But Martha Sontag Bradley, author of ''Women of Fundamentalism'', points out, “Women in Short Creek had few choices to make as adults. Here the culture of fundamentalism collaborated with the limited opportunities offered in this isolated, rural frontier community.”

A few days after the 1953 [[Short Creek raid]], Louis J. Barlow addressed placement marriages: "There have been no forced marriages. Everyone is free to leave or stay as he chooses".<ref name="Quinn"/>

Their choices are limited because they become so dependent on their leaders. The [[United Effort Plan]], along with their isolation contributes to their inability to leave their church, and therefore, they are unable to make decisions except those that are commanded of them by their leaders such as placement marriage.<ref>Bradley, Martha. “The Women of Fundamentalism:  Short Creek, 1953.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 23 (1990):15-38</ref>