Consider this passage from an insightful opinion piece by Gloria Steinem and Lauren Wolfe, which appeared in the UK Guardian in February 2012:
For example, in both city streets and war zones, men are far more likely to rape in groups. They feel they must uphold the cult of masculinity in the eyes of other men. As one soldier in Democratic Republic of Congo reported to Swedish researchers: "You feel you have to do something bad. You mix it all: sabotage, women, stealing, rip the clothes off, killing." Military officers sometimes order men to rape as proof of loyalty and shared culpability. Many militiamen in the thick forests of Congo tell researchers that they rape even when they don't want to. The consequences of not committing sexualised violence, they say, would be a severe beating by their superiors. It is a chain of control, held together by steely links of pain.
Soldiers sometimes express regret and say they wouldn't have raped without group pressure, as some said after carrying out atrocities in Bosnia. Also, group hatred in war means humiliating enemies by raping "their" women, implanting sperm, taking over their means of reproduction, wiping out the enemy race or ethnicity. Cultures that put all "honour" in the purity of "their" women – and keep women weak – are actually setting them up as targets. An insistence on "purity" is just the other side of the coin of insisting on sexually servicing other men. In both cases, the body of a woman exists in the battlefield of male control.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/24/sexual-violence-women-cult-masculinity
Polygamy takes the same kind of abuse, shaming, pain and exercise of control, and prolongs its diabolical process by years and even generations. One act of rape can be devastating and, in the longterm, horribly scarring. Imagine an act of group rape that consists of Joseph Smith's pressure on his followers to violate their consciences by entering into illegal "marriages" that violate the sanctity of their marital vows to their first spouse. Imagine the coercion of young girls who were told that their eternal salvation was at stake--that the eternal salvation of their family was at stake, if they did not cooperate with Smith's demands for marriage.
All of these things were psychologically and physically devastating, and they pulverized their victims slowly, year after year, generation after generation. And now, even today, the descendants of Joseph's victims feel compelled to sanctify Joseph's crimes, his acts of rape, perpetrated personally or through agents, that were dressed up in theological garb. And now is the time to free ourselves from this burden. We need no longer be held hostage by Joseph Smith's Game of Thrones, wherein people were promised godhood in exchange for perpetrating crimes against spouses and family members, and thereby reaped psychological devastation. There needs be no defense of Joseph's crimes. He sought to make his followers his fellow criminals, and for generations the scam has worked. Now that we know the crime, we can stop doing the time.