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Dr. Susan Stickevers, an assistant clinical professor and residency program director at State University of New York with a longstanding interest in ensuring that polygamy remains criminalized, is certain the evidence is there. Based on her reading of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies, she doesn’t buy the argument that polygamy is a justifiable religious or cultural practice.

“When there is evidence of damage to women and hurt to children, we don’t have to tolerate it any more than we would tolerate suttee (a woman burning to death on her husband’s funeral pyre) or infant sacrifice,” she said in a telephone interview. Full article below >>

Polygamy on trial

BY DAPHNE BRAMHAM, CITIZEN SPECIAL

British Columbia Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman has taken it on himself to be the one who rules on the ground-breaking constitutional case involving polygamy when it goes to trial sometime next year.

Bauman, who was appointed in September, will decide whether banning polygamy is a justifiable limitation on religious freedom. Regardless of what he decides, it’s almost certain that this case will be appealed first to the B.C. Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court of Canada.

Lawyers for both the B.C. and Canadian governments will argue that polygamy should not be allowed because of its inherent harm to women and children.

So, before the case even gets to trial, Bauman will have to decide whether to appoint someone to argue that the practise of polygamy is protected by the guarantee of religious freedom.

Until six years ago, the B.C. government held the view that the polygamy law was unconstitutional. As a result, for more than a decade it refused to lay charges against fundamentalist Mormon leaders in Bountiful.

In law, harm doesn’t have to be imminent. In two disparate cases — Malmo-Levine, where the criminal offence of marijuana possession was upheld, and a child pornography case involving Vancouverite John Robin Sharpe — the Supreme Court of Canada said it was enough that both generally cause harm. Still, government lawyers need to show harm. They might start by looking at the medical research.

Dr. Susan Stickevers, an assistant clinical professor and residency program director at State University of New York with a longstanding interest in ensuring that polygamy remains criminalized, is certain the evidence is there. Based on her reading of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies, she doesn’t buy the argument that polygamy is a justifiable religious or cultural practice.

“When there is evidence of damage to women and hurt to children, we don’t have to tolerate it any more than we would tolerate suttee (a woman burning to death on her husband’s funeral pyre) or infant sacrifice,” she said in a telephone interview.

Stickevers’s interest in polygamy was first piqued in the mid-1980s when several of her students were “Sullivanians,” followers of psychiatrist Henry Stack Sullivan, who forced them to sleep with one another on a rotational basis. But it was only 12 years ago that she began to study the research when a patient’s health suddenly declined after her Muslim husband took a second wife. Since then, Stickevers has had a number of Muslim plural wives as patients. Their experiences mirror the research conclusions: Polygamy is bad for most women, particularly the first or senior wives.

The focus of the peer-reviewed studies varies widely — among people who immigrated to the American Midwest in the 1970s, fundamentalist Mormons, Bedouin Arabs, Nigerian Christians, African animists, Muslims in the United Arab Emirates.

Of those studies, 90 per cent conclude that women suffer some harm. The harm ranges from low self-esteem to mild depression to significant psychiatric problems.

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