Wednesday, April 14, 2010

April 14th 2010

I quietly mark the 36th anniversary of my abduction on this day. There is an ache that won´t go away today. I ache for all the broken children affected by divorce and custody conflicts, forced to tear a hole in their souls by having to choose which of their parents to love.
This breaks children´s hearts. It broke mine, as with each passing day after April 14th 1974, the memories of my mother´s love got weaker. I forgot her face, her language, her family. It all faded as I was told terrible things about her, untrue things, and read the hatred on my father´s face. She became a stranger to me, a faceless stranger, as I struggled to survive my new life, life on the run. I was running away from my own mother.
I went along with the lies because I was too innocent to believe that my own father would betray my trust. And because I had no real choice. As I stopped missing her because I could not remember her, I absorbed my father´s hatred and made it my own. I became afraid of her as she became a faceless stranger who wanted to take me to a place I no longer identified with, and I became afraid to lose the life I had come to know. So I rejected her, hated her, to keep my father´s love. He was all I had, or so I thought for a long time.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Media madness, or the challenge of getting ones desired message across

In the past few weeks, I have been on the front page of one article and interviewed in another short article in Aftenposten, one of Norway´s more respectable papers. I was interviewed by NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting System´s) radio twice, appeared on NRK television once, and had an awful article published in VG, a tabloid newspaper. The last was awful and I´m going to try and forget about it, but the others were okay, though I feel a bit overexposed at this point as my dramatic story gets overly used every time.

This time around, there were larger issues connected to parental child abduction that were focused on in addition to my own story. I am happy about that, as I hope to work on large-scale issues connected to custody in the future. But I am a bit concerned about the parts of my interview that were left out in the articles and interviews. The Aftenposten journalist (a wonderful woman named Olga Stokke) and I sat and talked for over 2 hours, and the conversation got boiled down to a few short paragraphs in the paper. Typical, but worrisome for me when the subject matter is so sensitive.

It all started when I read an article in A magasinet, Aftenposten´s weekly magazine, about a growing trend among parents whose children have been abducted to another country--the trend is the recovery of children by SWAT-like teams who charge large sums of money to locate, track and smuggle children away from the parent who has abducted them. This is often done when the government or legal authorities do not intervene in a timely fashion, or in the case where children are abducted to countries that do not recognize the legal authority of the country a child was abducted from. But these teams are often used by parents whose children are abducted to other western countries, and rather than wait for the legal wheels to (often way too slowly) turn, these parents take matters into their own hands.

It is awful to have a child abducted and to feel helpless because the child is in a country that does not recognize international child abduction treaties or does not have diplomatic ties with western countries. To feel that no one, nothing, can help and that one has to take matters into one´s own hands is a terrible place to be. This can be the case even when dealing with "friendly" countries, countries that do recognize international child abduction as a crime. All too often, the wheels of justice turn way too slowly in these cases, or do not turn at all. I have incredible sympathy for parents in these situations and for the mother featured in the story in A Magasinet, but despite this, warning bells went off in my head.

While I do see the value of recovering children in this manner in some cases, I have been contacted by children who have been "recovered" back and forth multiple times, as both parents feel entitled to custody of the child and will not compromise. These children are angry and bitter at both parents, and are often terribly traumatized and angry. From their point of view, both parents are seen as either untrustworthy or possessive, and these children are stuck in a tug of war in which there are no real winners. Of course, each case is unique and there is not any one solution for all families. But I knew that I had to speak out about the dangers, while at the same time encouraging society and the authorities to do more for these families so that such drastic measures and potential negative consequences could be avoided if at all possible. Unfortunately, I feel that my message got reduced to warning parents not to recover in this way, without all the nuances and reasons for why I feel this way coming across.

If a child has been missing for a long time, I worry about the trauma of losing what has become familiar and known, without the buffer of a transition period and mental and legal help to shield the child from shock, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. I foresee damage to the future relationship with the victim (or left-behind) parent and increased difficulty in forming trusting relationships. This was an important point in my interview, which got left out in the article itself. I talked at length about the concept of parental alienation, which is the process in which a child is turned against a parent and is made to believe that they are dangerous to them. This happened to me, and I told the journalist that once some time had gone by and I forgot my mother and her love, it would have been terribly traumatic to be recovered by undercover agents without a transitionary period and good mental health support. I emphasized the fact that the authorities must act in a more timely way in these cases to avoid this issue. The return to the original home as soon as possible is imperative in order to reduce trauma.

My ideal scenario is one where the legal and mental health authorities work quickly to locate and resolve cases of parental abduction, and where children are given intense support in reuniting with the parent they were abducted from so that the process of return is as gentle as possible, thus giving the reunited parent and child every possible chance at success.

Additionally, older children who experience undercover recoveries may react in self-destructive ways. I have witnessed this personally, and this is another problem in recoveries of older children who have not been given proper support and preparation for returning to the victim parent.

Last but not least, my biggest concern is that if this trend continues, where parents feel forced to take matters into their own hands, the government will continue to view parental abduction, especially complex cases of international parental abduction, as "private" or domestic issues, best left to parents to solve on their own.

The high risk of physical and emotional harm to children and parents, the risk of financial ruin for desperate parents (these militaristic teams can charge up to several hundred thousand dollars depending on the case), and the threat of lessened societal and governmental involvement, are the reasons why I urge that taking matters into ones own hands this way be approached with extreme caution.

It is unfortunate that the nuances of my message did not come through in the Aftenposten article. I appeal to national and international authorities and to child welfare agencies to take parental child abduction seriously enough that each case is given top priority immediately upon being reported. The time factor is of the essence, both regarding the physical state and location of the child, but just as importantly, the emotional and mental state of the child. It did not take my father long to alienate me from my mother. The simple passage of a few weeks is enough time to create a great sense of distance and fear of the other parent in the heart and mind of a young child.

I did not mean to indicate that victim parents are the "bad guys" for resorting to what I see as desperate measures, but that many more resources are needed to adequately address the growing problem of child abduction by the authorities. And I simply wanted to point out that, in the long-run, I do not see undercover recoveries as a workable solution of choice in most cases. The children desperately need and deserve to be prioritized in these cases, so that they can be returned to their legal domiciles as soon as possible.


Here´s a link to the front-page article in Aftenposten: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3441456.ece

Here´s a link to a follow-up article in Aftenposten, where I comment on the New Year´s Eve abduction of a 4-year-old girl to Iraq by her father: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article3446401.ece