It was all about underage marriages and the sexual abuse of girls. It was not about religion.

That's what the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services says in a report about its raid of the Yearning for Zion Ranch last March and the cases against parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that grew out of it.

Given what we know about the FLDS, from this report and previous criminal cases, and from sources like Carolyn Jessop's book, Escape , that's a credible explanation. Any community that arranges marriages of girls as young as 12 to much older men, encourages these young women to conceive children when they are still minors and uses religious dogma and threats of ostracism to keep them in line is inherently abusive. If parents condone and participate in these practices, they are abusers, as the state alleges.

Whether Texas authorities can make criminal charges stick against 12 men from the YFZ Ranch is something that the courts must decide. The men are accused of offenses including sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual assault, tampering with evidence, bigamy and failure to report abuse. Whether the evidence of these allegations was obtained legally during and after the raid probably will be key to these prosecutions.

That said, the circumstances of the raid still are unsettling. The rounding up of 439 children from the ranch and their forced removal to temporary state custody for two months, often without their mothers, is a trauma that we believe could and should have been avoided.

In the end, after all the interviews, the DNA testing and the searches of seized documents, Texas officials concluded that 12 girls are confirmed victims of sexual abuse and neglect because they were married at ages ranging from 12 to 15. They were among 43 girls between the ages of 12 and 17 who were removed from the ranch, meaning that roughly one in four pubescent girls on the ranch was in an underage marriage, according to the report.

The authorities also report that of the 146 families investigated, it is reasonable to believe that 91 were involved in sexual abuse or neglect by one or both parents, meaning that a child in the family entered into an underage marriage and the parents did not take reasonable steps to prevent that.

Assuming that these allegations are accurate, we agree with Texas authorities that this is no way to raise children, and that when evidence is available, a state should intervene to protect them from sexual exploitation.