On Sunday, May 11, Linda Smith, a professor and clinical program director at the S.J. Quinney College, published an op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune.
Smith’s editorial, titled “Child Protection and the FLDS: There’s a Better Way,” concerns the recent raid on the polygamist YFZ Ranch in Texas and the removal of more than 400 children from their parents’ custody by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
In her Op-Ed, Smith writes that, in the case of those families that had not supported underage marriages,’ “it is not clear why the court found their children at risk of parental abuse or neglect.”
She further argues that “toddlers (ages 1 to 4) are probably most put at risk for emotional harm by being removed from their primary caregivers.”
Click here to read Smith’s Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed