Laid bare in a Texas courtroom this week was the ugly, disturbing truth about the institutionalized pedophilia practised by polygamous leader Warren Jeffs and supported, tacitly if not overtly, by his 10,000 followers in the United States and Bountiful, B.C.

Unlike British Columbia which has long failed to protect children as it dithered over whether religious freedom justifies polygamy, Texas aggressively pursued complaints about child rape and forced marriage within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Jeffs – the FLDS prophet – was convicted Thursday of child sexual assault and aggravated child sexual assault of a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old. He was the eighth FLDS member to be convicted in Texas since a 2008 raid on the church’s compound.

Key to the conviction of the 55-year-old, fundamentalist Mormon leader was DNA evidence of his fathering a child with a 15-year-old and bizarre audio tapes.

One tape was made as he ritualistically raped the 12-year-old with others watching. Another was his instructions to a “Quorum of 12” brides to shave their pubic hair and always be sexually ready “when I need your comfort.”

Among that Quorum of 12 was at least one Canadian — a girl whom Texas authorities first alerted B.C. child protection staff to in 2008 when she was found during the raid.

On Friday, the Texas jury was told that of Jeffs’s 78 wives, 24 were under the age of 17 when they married.

At least five of those under-aged brides are from Bountiful. Their names, birth dates, marriage dates and parents’ names were included in a list of 31 under-aged brides filed four months ago in B.C. Supreme Court as part of the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is valid.

The Bountiful girls were handed over to Jeffs by their fathers, brothers and sometimes their mothers — all leading members of the community who took great lengths to ensure that they were not detected by either law enforcement officers or border patrols, according to Jeffs’s diaries (which formed part of the case in Texas and are also widely available on the Internet).

What’s mystifying is why British Columbia has taken no action on any of that information.

More than three years after government officials were first notified about at least one under-aged Bountiful girl in Texas, there has still been no move to repatriate or protect any of the under-aged girls who were illegally either taken to the United States or brought from there to Bountiful.

Even excluding the girls who have already been raped, there are more than 400 children in Bountiful’s two, government-funded schools. Half of them are certain to be children who need protection.

More than four months after the list of 31 girls was filed in B.C. Supreme Court, no charges have been laid against the fathers, mothers and brothers who transported child brides into the arms of middle-aged men or against the middle-aged men who brought child brides home from the United States.

The question must be asked: Why not? The B.C. government has a moral and legal responsibility to protect children and prosecute their abusers. Protecting children and charging child abusers has nothing to do with the constitutional reference case or Chief Justice Robert Bauman’s ongoing deliberations.