Hard Road for Exiled FLDS Boys

If you're familiar with the Mormon offshoot Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), perhaps from John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, then you are probably familiar with its litany of controversies. The polygamous social structure and the incidents of domestic violence, the rape convictions of sect leader Warren Jeffs and his systematic excommunication of male rivals.

What you may not be familiar with is the economic hardship facing the community's hundreds of under-aged exiles.

Last week, during the Tribeca Film Festival, I saw a documentary that put the plight of these teens into sharp focus. Sons of Perdition, which had its world premiere at the festival (watch the trailer here) follows a group of boys who leave "the Crick" (pictured), the nickname for the FLDS compounds of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

When FLDS teens are kicked out of or flee the Crick, typically for St. George, Utah, they are cut off completely from their parents and siblings. In addition to the psychological trauma of banishment, and the fear they hold for sisters who may be married off in their early teens, they are confronted with figuring out how to survive in mainstream society.

"It's like taking a kid from Somalia and putting him in downtown L.A. They don't know how to apply for jobs, don't know how to balance a checkbook," one person in the film's trailer points out. "They don't even know what a checking account is."

These exiled, minimally educated and semi-homeless kids often bunk together in small apartments, sometimes 10 to 20 boys in just one or two bedrooms. For awhile, the teens spotlighted in the film are taken in by local software millionaire Jeremy Johnson. Later, when they are caught succumbing to drugs, they live at a halfway house run by Johnson.

One group drawing attention to "lost boys" like those in the film is the Utah-based HOPE Organization. Its site includes a useful archive of articles chronicling journeys like these, as well as profiles of about a dozen women who escaped from abuse in the Crick. In August, HOPE kicked off a Jump Start program to teach life skills to kids in Hildale and Colorado City.

The Diversity Foundation in South Jordan, Utah, is also working specifically to find homes for exiled youths. To help out, you can donate online.

Even if they had all the resources in the world available to them, the scars of feeling severed from their families will continue to impact these young people. The very least that we should hope for them is a stable roof and the opportunity to acquire the education necessary to transform their lives.

Photo credit: K O