I doubt this is new. Anyone remember those things from Xenosaga III you don't want to remember?

@ kyuusei: who is that in your avatar?

I'm probably the only person in the world who still isn't sick of "Lollipop," lol..

<--Is Canadian:

We watched a video on them in Anthropology class, and I believe a few of them are being charged right now and were recently in the news. That would be the community of Bountiful, correct?

Also, I must admit, I was always aware on a subconcious level that this shit happens everywhere, but I fell into the trap of "It never happens in a CIVILIZED country!" which is, of course as this proves, utter garbage.

Roger, you'd be surprised at what goes on right under our noses in the US.  In that Van Halen video for "Right Now" over a decade ago, there was a snippet that said "Right now the US is doing things that we think only other countries do."  That says it all.

I'm sure a lot of us thought the Shanghai-ing in Portland Oregon was long gone.  But I mentioned in another thread that there are people in the US who pose as modeling agencies who "hire" teenage girls and sell them to foreign, mostly Middle Eastern, princes.  Analeigh Tipton, a contestant on Top Model, was scammed by one of those bogus agencies and almost sold to a Saudi prince, but she somehow got out of it.  So human trafficking and such do happen in the US.   

I would've thought that arranged marriages were limited to places like India or Pakistan where they're still practiced, but it doesn't surprise me that very old-fashioned rural communities even in the US would do those old-fashioned betrothals.