I listened to this half hour show this morning, it's about to be repeated tonight (9:30pm 26/08). I highly recommend listening to this powerful account - the institutions may be different but the emotional resonance is compellingly familiar.
Nic'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tgfr7
On The Choice this week Michael Buerk talk to Elissa Wall who was born into the strange, narrow world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints - an American sect that had broken away from the Mormon church.
It was a group that believed in religious devotion, hard work, female subservience, the virtues and the clothes of the prairie puritans - and polygamy. Elissa was married off at 14 to a 19-year-old cousin - a relationship she hated. After several miscarriages, and a stillbirth, she faced the toughest choice of her young life - to stay with the community and the church, which was all she knew, or to leave. That would mean, not only separation from her mother and sisters, maybe for ever, but taking on the man who had ruled her life, the cult leader Warren Jeffs.