Domestic/Family kidnappings?

[Carol]

After reading through some crime crime, it appears to me that a significant percentage of kidnapping cases involve a person (generally a child) being kidnapped by a family member (generally a parent).

Just some academic questions...

What person is most at risk for such a situation? The child of parents going through a divorce? The child of parents that are heavily in to drugs and the like?

Can something be done...can a child do something to prevent these incidents?

 

[Tez3]

Here it tends to be the children of parents who are of different nationalities. When divorce preoceedings decide who should have custody often the one who hasn't will take the children back to their own country. Some countries have agreements in place to get the children back but there's a lot who don't. It's very difficult to go through court proceedings in another country where language difficulties and different laws often that don't allow mothers the rights fathers have. We've had some high profile cases where the children have been taken to India and Pakistan. The latter is a country that is hard for mothers to get their children back. In these cases its always the father who has taken them.
Other cases we've seen in the news are parents 'kidnapping' the children to avoid social service taking them into care. I remember one case too where foster parents had applied to adopt the children they had looked after for years and social services were going to take them away for a very trite reason so they took the children and fled with them. I don't think they were ever found either.

Difficult to know what to do as custody has to be fair and you can't stop one parent seeing their child just because they might run off with them.

 

[sgtmac_46]

After reading through some crime crime, it appears to me that a significant percentage of kidnapping cases involve a person (generally a child) being kidnapped by a family member (generally a parent).

Just some academic questions...

What person is most at risk for such a situation? The child of parents going through a divorce? The child of parents that are heavily in to drugs and the like?

Can something be done...can a child do something to prevent these incidents?

The child of parents going through extremely contentious divorces. Also, drug use and mental illness can be contributing factors.

In some instances, one parent may legitimately believe that the other parent is a danger, and want to avoid their children having further contact. More often, however, one parent is extremely vindictive and wants to use the child as punishment against the other former partner, and taking off with the child is an extreme example of that, where the kidnapping parent can feel they have 'won' by completely depriving the other parent of the child.

Again, drug use and/or mental illness can seriously contribute to that..............folks with bi-polar disorder, for example, can create elaborate fantasies about how the other spouse is some sort of evil figure, and that they are somehow acting in a very noble fashion by taking off with the child in a manic state of consciousness. After that they are committed to a course of action.

 

[jks9199]

According to several sets of statistics, most child "abductions" are variants of familial abduction where a non-custodial parent or other family member takes the kid because they don't like the custody agreement. Sometimes it's mixed nationalities, or mixed religions, other times it's just a really messy and bad divorce. A lot of them are well meaning, in that the person taking the kid has real (at least in their mind) concerns about the kid, and are trying to protect them. Others are spiteful; one side is trying to punish the other by keeping the kid past the time for return on a visitation, or denying visitation. (Yes, I've had someone want to make that report because the other party was a whole 5 minutes late...)

As to prevention... there are limits to what you can do. Schools have, unfortunately, become quite used to specific rules about who can pick up kids but that only helps while the kid is at school. If there's a visitation order, and there are concerns about potential abduction, it's imperative that the family work with the courts to modify the visitation orders such as requiring them be monitored, stipulating where they may go, or eliminating the visitation, depending on the extent of the concern. It's not always easy, though! In Virginia, for example, there still remains a very strong presumption in the courts that "children of tender age" should be in the custody of the mother. There's no definition for "tender age"... I've heard horror stories of mothers selling themselves for drugs, with documentation, the kids wanting to live with dad, and the court still granting the mother custody.

You also have to make sure that the kid understands who they're allowed to be picked up by, and when. Otherwise, they may innocently aid in their abduction by getting in a car with grandma or Uncle Bob... And the kids need to know what to do if a family member like that tries to take them somewhere without permission.