Fine. Mom apparently had a fairish bit of dialogue, and I’m sure gave some of her side of things, in the Facebook chats. The daughter’s so far unmoved, but okay, have it out in the open a good bit more.
You got this where? Oh, you made it up. Okay then.
How has the mother done anything wrong by enforcing her rights as soon as she reasonably could? It is not her fault the father was really good at hiding from her and the law for 15 years.
I’m not treating them as property at all and have nowhere said he is “entitled” to “have” them. In fact mom’s approach is the one that very much treats them like chattel that she’s wrongfully been deprived of.
Again with the brainwashing, and lying, and being forced to lie. Hint: when your argument depends on facts you made up that weren’t in the story, argument may need work.
Again with “her rights.” That is not how I was taught the “best interests of the child” rule worked.
Substitute the word “kidnap” for “rape” or “murder.” After 15 years he’s been caught and found to have forged a new life. Does 15 years make any difference to victims of the crime he committed?
This is a tricky situation because clearly the father broke the law, and deserves to be punished. Similarly, the mother made contact, the child made it clear that she wasn’t interested in a relationship and then went to the police, so now her children will resent her for having their father arrested and it will be years before she ever has a chance to make up for that, not to mention the 15 years she’s already missed, and have any kind of meaningful relationship with them.
In either case, I think the transgressions of the parents are of secondary concern to the well-being of the children. Unfortunately, there’s not anywhere near enough information in the article in the OP to make any sort of meaningful guess as to what that should be. Does it make sense to uproot two teenagers and send them to live with someone they don’t know and whom they both now resent? If the father would violate the laws and keep his children from their mother, how do we know what other things he may or may not have done? The way the article is written, it looks like the mother only contacted the police after her children didn’t want to have a relationship with her, so I have serious doubts that her motivation was what was best for her children.
Even if they don’t throw the father in jail, now that the cat is out of the bag, he should really make some concerted effort to encourage his children to establish a relationship with their mother. And the mother should probably consider dropping charges on the condition that they can work together to help establish a relationship, because otherwise, I can’t see her children not hating her pretty much forever.
I think a better example is if he had kidnapped a couple of kids from a park, raised them as his own, and several years later they have forgotten their origins and are happy with “daddy”. Should the kids go back to their original parents, and should his ass be thrown in jail?
I think, absent a clear and present danger to the children, it’s a wrong PARENTING choice to break an intact family who wants to stay together. I agree that it’s the right legal thing to do, I’m just not sure if it was the right parenting thing to do.
Of course, **Czarcasm **makes a good point. It’s quite likely (not definitive, sure, but quite likely) that the father has told them at least one lie about their mother, even if it was something like, “she died,” or “she doesn’t want to be a mom”. At some point, the kids deserve the truth and the means to work out their own relationship with their mother. And given his history and the Facebook page being taken down, it’s also likely that they would flee again and Mom would lose her chance to get her side of the story to the kids.
sigh I dunno. It’s ugly, and I don’t have a way to solve it. My own fiance’s son was lied to and poisoned against him by his ex, who kept him from any contact at all after age 2. When his son was 18, *he *contacted his dad and they slowly worked out their relationship as adults and son is now reassured that he’s somewhere near “the truth” of the way things went down. So I put this mother in that place and yeah, I do think the children have a right to know her version of events and her love for them all these years…I just wish she hadn’t needed to rip their family apart to do it. …which, of course, is primarily the fault of the father that stole them away from her. Ick. It’s just icky. Of all the people that are getting punished here, the kids get it the worst, and they’re the only innocents!
There’s probably no happy ending to this story and there is no right or wrong. The mom has a right to want to make contact with her children; to walk away would be wrong. How would she then know that the best interests of the children are being met? I would bet the Dad has told the kids enough stories that they don’t want to meet their mom. In any case, there’s no going back.
As a society we can’t just shrug and let it go. Wrong would be done to all the other non-custodial parents of the US, and their children.
Quite obviously it does here, the proof being in the pudding – the kids appear traumatized by mom’s busting him, there’s no evidence they have any trauma from/memory of the “abduction” – maybe it was tough at the time, maybe they were too small to know. My default assumption is that any contemporaneous trauma (which is now seemingly forgotten) was roughly on the order of the trauma from going with mom and losing any contact with dad.
Oh, and this is why I am opposed to the word “kidnapped” here – violating a custody order is a crime, but unlike rape or murder, in which the victims are never left equally well off or better off, there is nothing inherent in a custody order that guarantees that kids taken in violation of it will be significantly worse off than if the violator obeyed the order.
"The best interests of the Child’ were determined 15 years ago. HE defied the best interests of the child to further his own selfish interest. It just took 15 years to catch up to him.
And yes, she as the mother and custodial parent has rights that deserve to be upheld, as well. Especially since those rights were what were determined to be in the ‘best interest of the child’.
The fact that the children no longer know any better, does not mean that they are better off with him now.
Stealing children that you do not have a legal right to is kidnapping whether you believe it or not.
This, this, a thousand times-this. Letting him get away with this would serve as a horrible example that would haunt the courts for years to come.
How was it in their best interest to rob them of their mother for their entire childhood?
Would you feel any different if this was an overseas abduction, Not Without My Daughter style and the kids were now glad to be living in Iran away from their infidel mother? Or what if it was a stranger who abducted them and ended up doing a bang-up good job raising happy and healthy kids? How about some other crime- let’s say he’s having sex with the girl, and for whatever reason she enjoys it? Why should the state interfere with her happiness?
You don’t abduct kids. If you do, regardless of the result, you get punished for breaking a very sensible law. What is in the best interest of the kids comes after enforcing the law. Dad got thrown in jail for breaking the law, now you have to figure out what to do with what you’ve got. If he had a good reason for wanting sole custody, he needed to follow the legal route to that. The fact that he didn’t do that, combined with the daughter’s rather abrupt rejection, is a pretty strong indicator that whatever happened was fishy and chances are the kids have an incomplete understanding of things.
Anyway, we wouldn’t let a murderer go free just because it’d be tough on the kids. We don’t let kidnappers go free even if the results are good.
From what I understand, this case isn’t resolved yet. I’d be extremely surprised if they just wholesale handed custody over to the mother. Chances are the kids will be places with a more neutral relative as the mother is slowly reintroduced to their lives. It may even end up that the father ends up retaining custody. It’s a bit early to get worked up when nobody even really knows what happened.
The mother has no discretion to drop the charges. That’s for a prosecutor to determine. The crime was commited against her children, not just her. You don’t reward people for kidnapping just because they don’t get caught for a long time, and the Stockholm syndrome in the children is just part of the damage that he’s done to them.
By that rationale, if the mother had known where the children were fifteen years ago, she wouldn’t have any way of enforcing her parental rights.
Which would be good if facts, circumstances, personalities were all static for all time. Which of course is 100% contrary to fact. The parents are not the same people they were 15 years ago. Nor are the kids. Nor are the parents’ financial, social, maturity traits. They could be better for mom and worse for dad. Or vice versa. The kids could have different needs as teenagers than as toddlers. My god, some of you people have enormous faith in the conclusive truth and finality, for time and all eternity, of a piece of paper written by some bureaucrat over a decade ago. I get the rule of law – I get it, and find where I endorse dad or say he should get a free pass. You won’t. But you people holding up a 15 year old decree as conclusive proof of what is NOW, AND PLEASE READ THE PART OF NOW THAT SAYS “NOW” in the kids’ best interest – it’s either touching, or delusional. I think probably the latter.
You really do think of children as just another piece of property that gets fought over who it “belongs” to in the property division of a divorce.
It was clearly (well, probably) suboptimal at the time. We can’t step back into that river, and two wrongs, etc.
I have a hard time buying this. If she was able to find her kids on facebook, then that means the father didn’t really make any sort of meaningful effort to disguise himself because he was using the same name. Thus, even before Facebook, I really doubt it would have been terribly difficult to track him down, certainly a private investigator could have found such an uncommon name like that pretty easily.
Again, the real question isn’t whether she was within her legal rights, which she was, but what her motivation was. Based on the article, it says she contacted her daughter, started corresponding, and didn’t contact the police until after the relationship stalled and she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in a relationship with her mother. So it seems to me that she contacted the police, not because she had her kids’ best interest at heart, but because she was hurt, otherwise, if she really thought that was the best thing to do, why didn’t she contact the police as soon as she verified she was her daughter?
Yes, the daughter is still a minor, but we’re dealing with a 17 year old here, not a young child. Yes, the father did them wrong, but do you really think a teenager is going to care? She is going to hate her mother for injecting herself in her life after telling her to leave her alone. Is it really a better situation for her to go live with her, 3000 miles away?
I’m not sure what the best resolution to the situation is, but I think going by the letter of the law here probably isn’t it.
Not a chance. No judge is going to reward a kidnapper with custody rights. That would be insane.