"It was total humiliation, " Rozier said.

"If you had a child that needed discipline, just like he would do today, take a switch from a tree and make them take their shirt off."

Rozier added that other kids had to "dig in the ground with their fingers."

Ex-Yahweh Wilbert Rolle's three children lived on temple property in the early 1980s. He said his kids were never beaten, but others were. He saw children with "welts" from public beatings, he testified. Once he witnessed Yahweh himself whipping a teen-ager on the back with a footlong switch, he said.

Assistant Dade State Attorney Michael Band, who prosecuted ex-Yahweh Rozier, said he knew of child abuse allegations years ago.

But the state, he said in an interview last summer, could never prove them.

Witnesses were afraid to talk. They were hard to find. In some instances, they expressed concern about sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, who remained in the sect.

The Dade state attorney's office simply lacked the investigative resources available to the federal government, Band said.

Other agencies heard the stories, too. But didn't act.

Florida's Attorney General Robert Butterworth passed on allegations about the misuse of child-welfare funds to Dade State Attorney Reno and Florida's Auditor General.

The auditor general concluded that it was too late to do anything about any possible fraud because the statute of limitations had run out.

The state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, which enforces laws against child abuse and neglect, said it didn't know a thing.

No victim ever called the department's 1-800 number, said HRS spokesman Ruben Betancourt.

Ellis Rubin, attorney for Yahweh, was unavailable for comment late Thursday about the sexual abuse allegations. In an earlier conversation, he said he couldn't discuss child abuse because it was the subject of a federal investigation.

Some months ago, after a Herald inquiry, HRS inspected the school at the Temple of Love. Inspectors tried to find out how many children attended.

In a box marked "census, " an inspector wrote: "Belief does not allow for counting."