B.C.’s criminal justice branch is appealing the acquittal of James Oler, linked to the polygamous community of Bountiful, for unlawfully taking his 15-year-old daughter across the border for a sexual purpose in 2004.
I was pleased to read this in The Vancouver Sun today.
The foundation for the 2017 convictions in the Bountiful, BC Child Trafficking Case began in 1988 with Debbie Palmer’s escape from the community. Married at 15 as a plural wife to a 58-year-old man, she was handed around by the leaders of the polygamous Mormon sect to three different husbands.
In 2002 CBC’s The Fifth Estate aired the documentary about Debbie’s life, Leaving Bountiful. Further CBC documentaries and interviews exposed physical, sexual and emotional abuses in the community along with the cross-border transportation of adolescent girls – children – to the United States as plural wives to older men. Keep reading →
I just read the Salt Lake City Tribune’s report on Friday’s conviction of Bountiful, BC’s Emily and Brandon Blackmore. Reading it, I was keenly aware that The Tribune is owned by the Mormon Church. Kristyn Decker’s (50 Years in Polygamy, Sound Choices Coalition) comments about polygamist Winston Blackmore of Bountiful being treated like royalty by LDS deviants at the Mormon Sun Stone Symposium in Salt Lake City last summer also came to mind.
The lead sentence in the article may be a tear jerker for some – a son pleading for leniency for his father, convicted of trafficking his 13-year-old daughter to a pedophile – but not to me. I don’t find “my religion made me do it” any excuse for the nature and severity of this crime. Nowhere in the article was the severity of harm caused to his 13-year-old daughter, by his actions and by those of his wife’s, even mentioned.
If lasting change is to take place, and the children of our province are to be protected from harm, the perpetrators of unfathomably evil crimes such as these need to be held fully accountable.
February 3, 2017
In a landmark ruling today, Justice Paul Pearlman of the B.C. Supreme Court found former husband and wife Brandon Blackmore and Gail Blackmore guilty of the charge of taking their thirteen-year-old daughter across the border for a sexual purpose in 2004.
The Blackmores will be sentenced, April 13.
Relaxing with some of the other titles after last Sunday’s event, with Jordy who makes the Human Library hum and Emily in the forefront – our incredible organizer who keeps everything running smoothly.
There is only one weekend left – next February 4 and 5.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the Human Library, check out my interview with the Georgia Straight