Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) inconsistent - False claims! No minor children raped! No minors pregnant! Just lies and more lies.
Pity the poor children - still in custody (for what?) - Claims by the Texas authorities were internally inconsistent. Claims were false - those who made the claims now admit - They were lying.
A few weeks back, the Texas Child Protective Service announced an increase in the
number of minors in their custody and explained it as due to their
having concluded that some of the people they had thought were adults
were actually minors; there was no explanation of the basis for that
conclusion. My memory is that the number given was in the twenties; one
webbed source says 25 but I have not yet checked back over the old news
stories to be sure.
A few days later, they announced that out of
53 girls aged 14-17 in their custody, 31 either were pregnant or were
mothers. Some versions of the story included a separate number for the
ones who were pregnant--two. CNN gave that number in its initial story
then removed it without, so far as I could see, any explanation. On the
basis of those figures, I calculated that the number pregnant was far
below what the average would have had to be for that many to be
mothers, and concluded that some of the figures were probably bogus.
At
some point thereafter, the CPS announced that two of the 31 were
sufficiently pregnant so that they would shortly be having their babies
in CPS custody. The babies were born. The CPS then announced that it
had discovered that both of the "minors" were in fact adults, one of
them 22. According to various news stories, the latter had a birth
certificate which she claimed to have shown the authorities early on.
That claim is consistent with an earlier news story to the effect that
the CPS was refusing to accept birth certificates as evidence of age.
It was on the basis of that that I concluded that the CPS had to be
deliberately lying, since they were making statements about the ages of
women in their custody without having any way of knowing how old the
women actually were. At that point their count of pregnant minors
appeared to be down to zero.
The news stories also reported that
24 more of the women who were supposed to be 14-17 claimed to be
adults. A later story reported that the CPS had conceded that at least
15 of its 31 "minor mothers or pregnant" were in fact adults. My guess
is that that included the two who had had their babies.
Finally,
we have one more fact. The Texas appeals court, in finding the seizure
of the children to be entirely unjustified, reported that the CPS had
actually identified five women who were or had been pregnant and were
asserted to be minors--presumably that meant "still asserted."
Now for a little arithmetic.
The
CPS started out with 5 young women aged 14-17 who they believed either
were mothers or were pregnant—the five counted by the appeals court.
That was not a very impressive number if they wanted to justify taking
400+ children away from their parents. So they selected 26 of the
youngest looking mothers among the adults—readily available to them
since the mothers were trying to stay close to their children—and
reclassified them as minors, getting a total of 31.
That fits
the total of 26 women who claim to be adults—15 of whom so far the CPS
has admitted are adults. It's one higher than the figure I saw for the
number reclassified as adults.
One possibility is that they
reclassified 25 adults and, in addition, one of the women they
initially thought was a minor was in fact an adult. That gets the
number of "pregnant or mothers" down to 30, however.
We might
eliminate that anomaly with additional detail I have not yet
mentioned—a 14 year old girl who apparently was included in the count
of "pregnant or mothers" but who the CPS, according to a news story,
has now conceded is neither. If they initially misidentified
her—perhaps someone thought she looked pregnant, or perhaps she had
refused to take a pregnancy exam—that would give them a starting number
of six, one a mistake, bringing the total back up to 31.
The
numbers fit together pretty well, and are at least consistent with my
earlier conjecture, that the CPS vastly exaggerated the number of
minors who had been pregnant in order to justify its actions. What else
might the number tell us?
If my calculations are correct, there
were actually about 27 (53-26) women age 14-17 among those seized in
the raid. Five of them had at some point had children, none were
pregnant. According to the appeals court, four of them are 17 (or were
when seized), 1 sixteen. They were alleged to have become pregnant at
age 15 or 16.
According to one webbed source,
the rate of teen birth for girls aged 15-19, was about 10% in Texas in
2000. Assume that the same figure holds for ages 14-17. If the 27 young
women were evenly distributed by age, then on average each had spent
two years in the 14-17 year range. If their pregnancy rate was average
for Texas, about 20% of them should have gotten pregnant, for a total
of of about five and a half--slightly more than actually did.
The
calculation is probably a bit high, since I have assumed that pregnancy
rates were constant over the range 14-19 and they almost certainly
increase with age. Also, I've seen a lower figure for the pregnancy
rate from another source, possibly for a different year. But my numbers
are enough to suggest that the rate of teen pregnancies in the FLDS
population was not strikingly out of line with that for Texas in
general.
Finally, consider the question of the ratio of young
men to young women. Various people commenting on my posts argued that
the teen women greatly outnumbered the teen men, providing evidence
that boys were being driven out in order to leave more wives for the
older men. That ratio was calculated, however, using the CPS claim
about how many young women there were aged 14-17, a claim we now know
was false. If we accept the estimates I have just offered, the real
number was about half as large--27 rather than 53. I haven't seen any
figures on the number of males age 14-17 in CPS custody to compare with
that.
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