Babies often water tortured by fundamentalist polygamists: Witness
Outside the courthouse, Jessop said water torture is common enough that there doesn’t seem any shame attached to the practice.
In her cousin’s baby book, there’s a handwritten note by her mother noting that when her daughter was 18 months old, she was becoming quite a handful and, as a result, was being held under the tap on a regular basis.
In court, Jessop said water torture was one of the reasons that she gave for gaining sole custody of her children after she left the group in 2003. She said her ex-husband, Merril Jessop, used it on “a lot” of his 54 children including her own.
“Merril was very abusive,” she said.
Abuse is one reason Jessop left the fundamentalist church, which has no affiliation with the mainstream Mormon church. As long as she stayed, Jessop felt powerless to protect her children from physical abuse because of the over-arching requirement of unquestioning obedience. The other is that her oldest daughter was 13 when the prophet, Warren Jeffs, began arranging marriages of girls as young as 14.