By CAROLYN JESSOP

Last updated at 21:16 12 April 2008

Watching the TV this week I wept as pictures were broadcast from an isolated part of Texas.

I saw 416 children - from infants to teenagers - and 133 women being taken into protective police custody.

They were driven away from a place they called "home" - a 1,700-acre desert compound run by the polygamist sect once controlled by their "prophet", Warren Jeffs.

Scroll down for more ...

Carolyn Jessop was hunted down like 'prey' after she escaped with her eight children

The reason I was crying was simple - those images of women wearing ankle-length dresses and holding the hands of bright-eyed children brought back terrible memories. For I was once one of them.

Many of those teenage girls were pregnant and some already had babies.

Few of the 416 youngsters brought out of the sect in the Texas desert knew their full names, birthday or even their own mothers.

Some had been beaten so badly they had suffered broken bones. Girls, some as young as 12 and 13, had been expected to have sex with much older men.

But as the freed youngsters played with donated toys, social workers claimed the shadow of fear was finally lifting for the children.

Scroll down for more ...

Rescued: Female members of sect are escorted onto a school bus in Eldorado, Texas

Relieved: A group of women church members tearfully embrace after being reunited at Fort Concho, Texas

No one knows better than I do what the horrifying reality of life was like at the Yearning for Zion ranch near Eldorado, south of Dallas - I was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS).

Only I was lucky enough to escape. I came from six generations of polygamists who formed the 10,000-strong FLDS, as we called it.

The organisation was part of the Mormon church, but broke away to defend the rights of its male members to have more than one wife - a practice the Mormons stopped at the turn of the last century.

When I was young, I remember being looked at with scorn when we went into the town in our long pastel dresses.

The residents called us "polygs" and sometimes threw rocks at us, but I didn't mind.

It proved to my young and naive mind that all the people in the outside world were evil.

At the age of 18, in 1986, I was made to marry a 50-year-old stranger - a fellow member of the cult - because that was expected of every young woman in our community.

Spiritual leader: Warren Jeffs is currently in jail in Arizona

It was deemed perfectly natural: the leader, our prophet, decided whom you should marry and you were supposed to do it without hesitation.

Except I did hesitate. When I was forced to marry, it was a turning point for me - a moment which made me question everything I had been taught.

But so strong had my indoctrination been, I still lived by the tenets of our faith, ignoring the questioning voice in my mind.

So, during the next 15 years, I bore my husband, Merril, who had six other wives, no fewer than eight children - five boys and three girls.

I had no alternative than to obey his demands - including treating him like a god.

If I refused, or failed in my tasks, I was punished. My every move was watched, and I was never allowed my own money. I knew I was being controlled and it frightened me.

My sister (also a member of the FLDS) and I used to have a grim joke: "Don't drink the punch" - a reference to the mass suicide of 900 members of the cult The People's Temple by drinking a poison punch under the orders of the Rev Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. We were terrified it might happen to us.

Indeed, ever since Jeffs inherited the leadership of our cult from his father in 2002, he'd been preaching that he was Jesus Christ incarnate.

He spoke about moving his followers to what he called the "Centre Place".

Scroll down for more ...

Compound: The sect built giant, elaborate temples on the West Texas ranch

My husband was close to Jeffs, who was rumoured to have 180 wives, and there was every chance that he, too - together with me and his other six wives and 54 children - would be among the first to be taken to the Centre Place, wherever it was.

Once I complained to Jeffs about my husband's treatment. Jeffs told me I was foolish. I never complained again, even though I wasn't allowed to kiss or cuddle my children because the cult forbade it.

I also wasn't able to protect them from Jeffs, who'd started marrying off younger girls to sect members.

My 12-year-old daughter, Betty, was once kept a virtual prisoner in his house for three days. I was never sure what happened to her there.

And so, in April 2003, at the age of 35 and with just £10 to my name, I ran away with my eight children.

Three years later, my testimony formed a crucial part of the case that led to Jeffs being jailed for being an accomplice in the rape of a 14-year-old girl who was forced to marry her adult cousin.

He is still awaiting trial on other child sex charges.

I was there the day Jeffs was convicted of the rape charge: September 25, 2007. It was an unforgettable feeling. I was finally free of his malign influence.

FLDS has also created many other Warren Jeffs - men intoxicated with power, determined to dominate their many wives and children.

But to explain why, and tell you what life was like under the spell of the FLDS, I really need to go back to the beginning.

You see, mine was no ordinary childhood. My father didn't want me to attend an ordinary school and so I lived on an FLDS compound.

My father would be travelling for his business - men were allowed to move freely, while women could do so only with permission, and even then were virtual prisoners thanks to their constant pregnancies.

My mother grew depressed by her isolation - complaining that she had nothing to live for and how she'd rather be dead.

So brainwashed was I that when I was six I told her: "Mama, I think Dad better hurry up and get a new wife."

That's the way I was trained to think. Not long afterwards, Dad did find a new wife.

But even back then I began to notice strange things - such as the fact many women wore dark glasses.

It wasn't long before I realised it was because they had black eyes from being beaten by their husbands.

Beating was commonplace in our house, too. My mother beat my two sisters and I every day - everything from small swats on the behind to a lengthy belt whipping.

I never told my father about the beatings, because it was accepted in our culture. What my mother was doing wasn't considered abuse; it was considered good parenting.

Anyway, there was no one to object to, or see what was going on. Our community was so isolated it was rare we saw anyone from outside.

Back then, I felt the luckiest girl in the world to be one of God's elite. I was FLDS royalty because I had a long bloodline of polygamy.

My grandmother told me stories about how her great-grandfather was one of the first men to introduce the principle of "celestial marriage".

She also taught me that my sole purpose on earth was to have as many children as possible and that God would reveal the name of the man he wanted me to marry by sending a revelation to our prophet.

We also grew up knowing an awful lot about the end of the world.

It had been drilled into us that we were God's chosen people, and when the apocalypse came - as it inevitably would - we would be saved, while the wicked would be killed and the world destroyed.

There was just one caveat. Before God slaughtered the wicked, he would allow them to try to kill us.

So the government, which was wicked, would try to kill everyone in our community, but - providing we were faithful - God would hear our prayers and protect us.

That was why we kept ourselves to ourselves so ferociously.

As a young woman growing up, I didn't question any of this - any more than I questioned why we were never taught about sex.

When we had health education at school inside the compound, all the chapters about human reproduction were cut out.

Sex was something a husband was to teach his wife. There were some women in FLDS who married and still believed that babies came from kissing.

When I was 17, I worked for a year as a teacher's assistant in the compound's school, and by the time I was 18 I had a secret dream of becoming a paediatrician.

I didn't know any other woman in the FLDS who was so ambitious, but I was determined to try, so I told my father of my desire to go to college.

He said he'd ask our prophet - who was then a man known as Uncle Roy, who controlled the church before Jeffs' father.

Just a few days later, my father woke me up.

"I had a chance to talk to Uncle Roy," he announced.

"He told me you could go to school to be a teacher. But he said that before you go you should marry Merril Jessop."

I was stunned. My future had just vanished. Now, even if I continued with my education, I'd have to do so while being constantly pregnant - as was expected of married women. My husband would also be able to overrule any decision about what I did.

I looked at my father in horror. I hardly knew Merril. He was 50, and I'd gone to school with his daughters. Now I was going to be one of their mothers.

"How does Merril feel about this marriage?" I asked him.

"How does he feel about marrying a child?"

My father simply said: "Oh, he's done it before. I talked to him and arranged for you to marry him this Saturday."

That was just two days away.

My father went on to tell me that this came down from the prophet of God and I should see it as a blessing.

"You should not question it, or allow the devil to interfere in your feelings."

My parents didn't intend to let me out of their sight until the wedding.

When Merril arrived at my house that morning, he didn't even acknowledge me - but when he left, he clearly expected me to follow, and I did.

As we pulled away from our house, I felt as though I was in a horror movie that was playing out in front of me. Except the horror was real and there was no escape.

I had no experience with men. I had never dated a boy. Relationships outside of marriage were taboo in our culture. But I certainly knew I didn't want Merril to touch me.

On my wedding night I was paralysed. I didn't want to consummate the marriage, but had no choice.

Merril took off my nightgown and shifted his body on top of me, but he couldn't perform and thankfully gave up.

The next day he took me to his house and introduced me to his three other wives - he was to get two more quite soon - as well as their ten teenage daughters and four other daughters aged between nine and 12.

But even though I hadn't wanted to marry Merril, didn't love him, let alone like him, I still believed in the FLDS doctrines.

I thought my husband was the revelation the prophet had received for me. I believed I was destined to bear his children and serve him until he died.

I also realised the only way to protect myself in my marriage was by remaining of sexual value to him.

Sex was the only currency I had to spend in my marriage - every polygamist wife knows that.

A woman who possesses a high sex status with her husband has more power over his other wives.

If she becomes unattractive to him, she is on dangerous ground - usually winding up as a slave to the dominant wife.

So although I hated Merril touching me, I knew I had to make myself attractive to him, even though there was no chemistry between us and our sex life was always perfunctory.

In fact, throughout our 17 years of marriage, he saw me naked only a few times, and the bedroom was always completely dark.

Nevertheless, I did bear him eight children - all of whom were regularly beaten by their father.

The only way I could stop Merril beating my children was to have sex with him.

But when my seventh child, Harrison, developed cancer as a baby and was whisked away to hospital, I finally realised that no one in our community cared about him.

Poor Harrison was so ill, but no one from the community came with us, no one expressed their concern.

Despite the intimate living arrangements I had with Merril's other wives, even they stayed silent.

This was a mark of the essentially competitive relationship we all had - the internal rivalries between six wives were hugely complex.

But this whole experience was a wake-up call for me. For 32 years I'd been brainwashed into thinking that every person outside the FLDS was evil - but suddenly I saw the only people willing to fight for Harrison's life, and stay at his bedside, were outsiders, the wonderful doctors and nurses who saved his life.

I secretly started to make plans to flee - from my husband, from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints and from its leader Warren Jeffs.

To avoid suspicions, I had to keep up the pretence of marital relations, which produced my eighth child, another boy called Bryson.

Thankfully, I managed to avoid the attentions of my husband and Jeffs. And just before 4.30am on Monday, April 21, 2003, I ran away.

I packed my eight children into our van and drove away from the compound, even though my 12-year-old Betty was screaming: "Mother, you're stealing us. Uncle Warren will come and get us. We don't belong to you, we belong to the prophet."

After five hours on the road, we arrived in Salt Lake City and went into hiding.

Within hours, Merril was hunting me down like prey, but I didn't care. I would rather be dead than live that way another minute.

Over the next three years I fought a long legal battle for my freedom, and the custody of my children - and I eventually won.

I still struggle with my past. I know I was brainwashed, but I struggle to free myself from the doctrines I was taught.

If I'd lost the custody battle, I, too, would have been one of those women ushered on to the yellow school buses in Texas this week - and that's a fate I would never wish on anyone.

I know what they went through. I can only hope they survive like I have.

•Adapted From Escape by Carolyn Jessop (Penguin, £6.99). Copyright Carolyn Jessop 2007. To order a copy (P&P free), tel: 0845 606 4206.