A decade ago Cindy Blackmore was the Canadian poster girl for polygamy. Now 24, she wants to raise awareness about the “disgustingly prevalent” amount of sexual abuse of children in fundamentalist Mormon communities like Bountiful, B.C. that has led to “a cycle of generations of messed up people.”

Blackmore plans to walk from Victoria to the Mexican border and use her blog to track her progress and share stories of others like her.

“It’s an entire community of girls and women who have been abused in the name of religion,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Las Vegas. “They are suffering and have suffered for years. They have no voice and these predators are living normal lives.

“This is not OK. It’s not OK that they live normal lives while these girls have to live with these demons in silence.”

Blackmore hasn’t lived in Bountiful since she was 14 when she not only fled her polygamous family and the community, she left Canada for the United States where she was taken in by another survivor.

In what describes as her decade of adventure, Blackmore has completed a degree in psychology, had two children and, until Aug. 15, she was a Boulder City, Nevada, police officer.

She quit after two childhood friends from Bountiful visited and recounted the rapes and sexual abuse they’d endured as children.

One said she’d been violently raped by an older stepbrother when she was four or five.

“I have a five-year-old,” says Blackmore. “If anyone did that crap to her, I would become a momma bear (that) nobody would want to be around. She’s a baby!”

Blackmore was shocked by their stories.

“I’ve always said that it wasn’t that bad growing up there. But, oh my gosh. It’s very, very widespread. I had no idea it was that bad. To be honest, I’m super-overwhelmed.”

Blackmore set up a blog to tell her friends and family that starting Sept. 1, she plans to walk from to Mexico to raise awareness of the widespread and unchecked abuse within fundamentalist Mormon communities in Canada and the United States.

“I have to let all of those girls who have been sexually abused know that there is hope. I want to raise awareness. I want to share their stories because all of these girls have been silenced for too long. … I just can’t ignore it. I have to do something because these girls need to have a voice.”

Within two days of setting up the blog, Blackmore heard horror stories from seven others, who told her they knew of at least 13 others like them.

Some want to go to the police. But the now-former police officer isn’t certain they’ll get justice.

“I’ve arrested somebody who did horrible, horrible things to kids. He was released the next day,” says Blackmore. “One of my friends was raped time after time after time between the ages of two and eight. How the f--- is she supposed to give dates or remember details?

“We’ve got a rash of girls willing to go to the police. But they don’t know how. They don’t know what to do. And I don’t know what to tell them.”

Blackmore doesn’t draw a straight line from polygamy to abuse. She notes that sexual abuse has plagued the Catholic Church as well as others including the mainstream Mormon church. But she doesn’t deny that it’s a factor because polygamous families are so big.

“Any culture that is so shut off is likely to have this happen. So when you have so many kids with no attachment to their parents, so many kids who are not supervised, it can’t help but happen.”

When Blackmore was in Grade 4, she said a cousin took her into the trees behind his family’s house and told her to take off her clothes. She did, but has no memory of what happened next.

When she was older, an uncle pinned her to the ground and kissed her all over. As she struggled and kicked to get away, she remembers people watching and laughing. The uncle and his family came for dinner every Sunday at Blackmore’s home. Every Sunday, she hid.

She told parents about both incidents. They did nothing.

She told them about another relative — a little boy — being taken to the bushes by a cousin and told to suck his penis. That same cousin fondled another girl that Blackmore knew.

“They (parents) don’t know how to talk about it. The result is that there’s this cycle of messed up people.”

None of the Bountiful parents did anything about it, she says. Nor did the religious leaders.

Of course, why would they?

Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison plus 20 years for sexually assaulting two girls aged 12 and 15, who were his “brides”.

Cindy’s uncle — Winston Blackmore — is a former FLDS bishop of Bountiful who since 2002 has led his own breakaway sect. In 2005, some of his wives organized a polygamy summit and there, Blackmore admitted that he’d had several under-aged ‘wives’ and that his son had married a 14-year-old.

Blackmore’s planned walk is a work in progress. She has a backpack, tent, sleeping bag and little else other than the will to get it done. If it seems a bit impetuous, well, that’s pretty much the story of Cindy Blackmore’s life.

She left Bountiful only a few months after the 2005 polygamy summit and having been portrayed in the National Post as the face of modern polygamy. Wearing a Molson Canadian sweatshirt, jeans with sandals and painted toenails, Blackmore had gone toe-to-toe with one of the organizers of a protest outside the summit.

“Every time I come into town, I feel like everyone hates me,” Blackmore fumed at the time. “They treat me like I’m an alien or something. Well, guess what? I’m normal.”

After a few months in Cranbrook, Blackmore boarded a plane for Las Vegas.

Sara Hammon took her in. A decade earlier, Hammon had fled a fundamentalist Mormon community after an abusive childhood. Hammon’s father had once been the prophet of the group on the Utah-Arizona border that morphed into the FLDS.

Blackmore admits she married impulsively a few years later. Her now ex-husband, Clyde Barlow, was one of the so-called lost boys, who had been kicked out when he was 14 by Warren Jeffs. When Blackmore met him, he was homeless and illiterate.

She left the marriage almost as abruptly as she’d eloped with him. Soon after finishing at the police academy two years ago, she went to the bank, withdrew $10,000 from her account, gave it to Barlow and left.

They remain friends and share joint custody of their five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. It’s Barlow who will care for them while Blackmore attempts to walk the 1,900 kilometres from here to Mexico. (She’s blogging at walkingforthem.wordpress.com)

Maybe it’s crazy to try. But this wilful young woman seems determined and her hope is that some other girls from Bountiful will join her.

dbramham@vancouversun.com

Twitter:@daphnebramham