Some people know exactly who the women are and what they’re for.

Ten former members of a Utah-based polygamist sect known as the Kingston Group are pursuing punitive damages against the organization after they say it subjected them to years of unpaid labor, sexual violence and human trafficking.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, the sect’s ex-members allege: “It is largely through … illegal marriage practices that the [Kingston Group] is able to unlawfully make girls and their children religious martyrs and traffic them for sexual and labor purposes.”

The lawsuit contains explicit details of how Kingston Group leaders – who also own and operate several businesses and schools in the suburbs of Utah’s capital, Salt Lake City – allegedly arrange incestuous and sometimes underage marriages between teenage girls and adult men with exalted status to produce hundreds of children.

Women (including girls) are for breeding. That’s the purpose of them. If you don’t use them for breeding you’re just keeping them alive for nothing. Why would you do that?

The suit alleges episodes of rape aimed at forcing pregnancy, group members covering up years of sexual abuse and indoctrinating children in elementary school about plural marriage.

…

Nine of the plaintiffs claim the Kingston Group made them begin working during their elementary or preschool days through their late teenage years. None of them received a paycheck, they allege.

In her complaint, Amanda Rae Grant claims she was assigned to work in her early teens at Advance Copy, where wedding announcements and invitations were printed, because “wedding pictures of little girls marrying men in incestuous or plural marriages could not be printed at Walmart”.

Another plaintiff, Jeremy Roberts, said he started working four hours a day – year-round – at a farm run by the Order when he was seven or eight. He allegedly was told that his hourly pay was $3.23.

By the time he was 12, Roberts said, he was working 12-hour shifts at a mine the Order ran.

It’s Mormonism by another name.