May 25th is International Missing Children´s Day, and PACT has great plans to mark the day. The 25th of May was declared Missing Children´s Day by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1983 following the disappearance of a young boy named Etan Patz, a child who was never found. His case made the news just a few days ago following new leads in the story. The 25th of May has been adopted by many countries around the world as a time to focus on the issue of missing children, and it is an important day for an issue that can use the attention, both in order to prevent, and resolve, cases of children who go missing.

I was a very young child living in New York when young Patz disappeared on his way to school on May 25th, 1979, and I still remember the story inspiring fear  in me and my little friends when we overheard adults talking about it. I salute his family for the efforts they have made in bringing the issue of missing children to the forefront, while at the same time my heart goes out to them for what must be a painful reliving of any family´s worst nightmare. I will follow the story with great interest, and I honor the memory of the little boy who inspired so much awareness about the tragedy of missing children around the world.

I also find myself wondering about how to protect my own children from harm without causing too much fear or worry for them. My six-year-old son, Aidan, is a sensitive and philosophical lad. I do not want to burden him with too much fear, and I hesitate to tell him about stories like Etan Patz´s or about other dangers lurking in the big world. And yet, I also want him to know that there are real risks out there. I get the sense that he instinctively understands that there are bad apples out there, and he has a good sense for smelling out situations or people that are less than 100% safe. I am happy that he has that gift, although I do not plan on leaving him to his own devices for a long time to come. It is a good gift for him to have, and I hope it will serve him well in the future.

As terrifying as stranger abduction is, it happens so rarely compared to other types of child abduction and abuse, such as family abduction or sexual abuse. Gavin de Becker, in Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe, notes that focusing on ”stranger danger,” the possibility of harm or abduction by a stranger, is way too limited of a focus for parents. He points out that the greatest dangers can be from those children know, often casually but also more intimately such as a family member or others who are close to a child. Children need to know that they can always ask for help, and that they are allowed to say no, even to someone they know and trust. And children need to understand that adults or older children can make mistakes or do wrong things.

Important points indeed. But as a parent, so difficult to explain to a trusting child! I would love for my children to believe, for as long as possible, that the world is an exclusively safe and secure place. But I would be doing them a disservice by giving them that picture alone, without also letting them know that bad apples do in fact exist. I still struggle to find a good balance between being realistic in an age-appropriate manner, and at the same time give my children a general sense of safety and well-being in their world. I will be on the lookout for good children´s books that address this and provide a good basis for conversations between my kids and I on this topic.

On a related note, I just came across an article about Etan Patz and missing children on milk cartons. Patz was the first child to be placed on a milk carton as a method of searching for missing children. I too had my face on a milk carton after my own parental abduction, one of the first after Patz. I wish I saved a carton. I actually found myself on one as a 13 year old, and still remember my shock and horror. I did not view myself as a "missing child" and it got me to reassess my own story and led me to contacting my mother some years later.

Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein Waters

I quietly mark the anniversary of my abduction on this day. I was parentally abducted away from one of my parents, my mother, at the age of 4. There is an ache that I can´t hide today. For my family´s pain, but I ache most for all the children affected by divorce and custody conflicts today, so many of them forced to tear a hole in their souls by feeling pressed to choose between which of their parents to love.

This breaks children´s hearts. I know it broke mine, as with each passing day after April 14th 1974, the memories of my mother´s love weakened. I forgot her face, my mother-tongue, her family. It all faded as I was told terrible things about her, untrue things, and read the hatred on my father´s face. Mom became a stranger to me, a faceless stranger, as I struggled to survive my new life, my life on the run. I became a partner to my father in was running away from my own mother.

I went along with my father´s story because I was too innocent to believe that my own dad would betray my trust, and because I had no real choice. As I stopped loving my mother because I could not remember her, I absorbed my father´s truths and made them my own. I became afraid of her, as she became a faceless stranger who wanted to take me back to a place I no longer identified with. I did not want to lose the new life I lived. And so I rejected her, hated her, to keep my father´s love. He was all I had, or so I thought, for a very long time.

I love both of my parents today, and that is a true gift. But the pain still lives on, though thankfully dulled by time and love. Years of loss of contact, years of fear, and of feeling alienated from myself, from the part of me that was of my mother, has taken a toll. How could it not? Self hate is a powerful thing to recover from. That is what alienation does: causes a child to feel that a part of them is wrong, is no good. When one parent hates the other parent so much that they wage a campaign of denigration against them, the underlying message to the child is that a part of them is tainted, and must be removed to the greatest extent possible. But there is only so much a child can hide fro a part of themselves. I look like my mother and even act a bit like her, and never really understood or accepted myself until I got to know her again. Children yearn to know both parents, the two people they come from. It´s a natural desire, and stifling it only works for so long, as most children seek out both halves of their biological heritage in order to find peace and self-knowledge.

This year marks an important turning point in my story. After over 20 years of estrangement, I have recently reconnected with my father, who is my abducting parent. I had felt the need to separate from him completely in my late teens. I needed to do so, as his paranoia and desire to control my life made it important for me to move forward in my life without his negative influences at an impressionable time. I felt so betrayed by him, and wondered for a long time if he really loved me. His actions were deeply selfish and my life on the run was particularly dramatic and frightening. I was sure for a long time that he didn´t really love me, and used me as a tool to punish my mother. I had to work through painful feelings and a deep sense of despair about my relationship with him. For a long while I didn´t think we would ever see one another again.

But then with time, I started to reconsider my decision to permanently keep him out of my life. My wedding day 8 years ago was wonderful, but there were glimmers of pain at the fact that he wasn´t there to celebrate with me. And when my two boys were born, again I missed his presence in my life. Last month, I finally went to visit him in his new home in Jerusalem. The impetus was to film my father for a documentary film being made, sponsored by PACT, about my family´s story. It was deeply healing to make the trip and see him. He cried when he saw me, and we had long conversations about the past, as well as some nice times together. I felt his love deeply. As an old and sick man, he was freer with his caring and love than he had ever been before.

Once again, I felt whole. I needed him in my life, just as much as I needed my mother in it. Despite what he has done, he is my father. The only one I have. And he does love me deeply. His decisions were made out of misguided love, and a misguided sense of right and wrong. He suffers from mental problems that affected his decision-making capabilities. I see that more clearly now, and can accept the flawed, vulnerable and weak person he is while at the same time being clear about the consequences of his actions on my entire family. Our relationship will always be limited, but at least we can have something of one today. I can have both parents in my life today, which is what I always wanted.

For more on parental alienation, see Pamela Richardson´s website: http://www.akidnappedmind.com/

Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein Waters

Lady Catherine Meyer is being interviewed this morning (starting at 0530 – now that´s dedication!) by Sky News and BBC television and radio regarding Chief Justice Matthew Thorpe´s annual report on international parental child abduction, released today.

So the news is that abduction rates are on the rise, and Catherine will focus on the effect this has on children, on current trends, and on what can be done about it. As an activist and also a mother who experienced the long-term international abduction of her two sons, Catherine is in a unique position to present the human side of this oft-misunderstood tragedy.

I personally met Justice Thorpe, a distinguished man with much experience related to difficult cases of abduction in the London courts. I had the chance to speak with him about rising rates of abduction. He has a commanding presence, and I felt a bit intimidated when I approached him at a conference on parental child abduction in Holland in February 2012. However, I felt comfortable once we settled into our conversation.

I attended the conference, a gathering of parental abduction experts from around the globe, as PACT´s representative. As one who had been parentally abducted as a child, being in the presence of hundreds of experts devoted to finding solutions to a problem that affects so many families was wonderful and powerful. It was a heady experience to be part of something so important.

To my knowledge, I was the only person there who had experienced abduction as a child, and many people expressed interest in my perspective. I appreciated that, on behalf of children currently dealing with abduction, and tried to present the child´s point of view as best as I could. I was never “found,” and lived 14 years on the run hiding from my mother and her family. I was abducted at a time when there was little understanding about the seriousness of parental abduction, and not enough was done to reunite me with my mother. With an increased focus, increased international communication and cooperation and resources nowadays, we can prevent many abductions and shed greater light on the issues through working on better laws and policies to deal with them.

Back to my conversation with Justice Thorpe. We discussed problems related to Article 13(b) of the Hague Convention, a treaty designed to promote international cooperation in cases of parental abduction. In recent years, rates of cases in which children abducted to another country remain in that country and are not returned to their countries of origin, has gone up. This is of concern, and although there are cases in which this is justified and correct, skyrocketing rates of non-return, as it is commonly called within the field, are cause for concern. Justice Thorpe expressed the strong conviction that his courts are true to the spirit of the Hague Convention, and that they unhesitatingly return children to their countries of origin whenever this is the right thing to do.

I was happy to hear this, as the Hague Convention has come under some attack in recent years. However, Justice Thorpe also talked about the heartbreak of custodial conflict, and how difficult it can be for judges to determine what is best in cases when both parents are good parents, and one parent wants to move out of the country. Making these difficult decisions where one parent will inevitably feel unjustly treated and will lose daily contact with a beloved child, is not for the faint of heart.

Attending the convention provided me with a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions that judges and others on the front lines of custodial conflicts must deal with. It is difficult terrain, indeed.

Globalisation trends and increased mobility will present ever-greater challenges, and will need to be addressed in a global way. I envision greater cooperation between nations as a partial solution to some of these challenges.

Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein Waters

Parentectomy

As this blog revolves around custodial conflict and how this affects children, I wanted to share a term I have used to describe what too often happens when parents grow to hate one another and are battling for the custody of a child.

It is easy to think awful things about a person we dislike, and especially if that person wants the same thing we want and only one person can have it! This is often the case in custodial disputes. Often, and especially when parents live in two different cities or countries, only one parent can have the kids live with them. Because of this, some parents will wage a war against one another because each one wants to win in court, and also wants to win the children over to their “side” in the ensuing court cases. In their pursuit of a win, some parents try to cause the child to reject or hate their other parent. When they are successful, I call this a parentectomy.

By my own definition, a parentectomy is when one parent wages a campaign of denigration against the other parent and turns a child against that parent through the use of lies, exaggeration, manipulation, threatened loss of love and care, or other extreme methods of turning a child against their own parent. Often, the intention is to appear to be the only trustworthy and loveable parent in the child´s eyes. The term has been used before, notably by Frank S. Williams, M.D. and Kimber Adams in their respective article and book on parental alienation of children. 

Sarah´s Journey

This blog is dedicated to families and children who are affected by custodial conflict, parental abduction and other difficult issues related to family breakdown and dissolution.

The goal is to shed light upon some of the relevant issues that affect the real people behind the statistics on missing children. Personal stories and interviews, as well as relevant articles and links, will be featured here.

We want to give a voice to the unknown numbers of children struggling today with family conflict and other related issues. This includes children who are affected by divorce, child abduction and runaway children.

 What is it like to grow up in the shadow of divorce and custodial battles?

What are the factors that cause a child to make the decision to run away from home? What does it take to reconnect broken bonds between children and parents who have been disconnected from one another after divorce and separation?

This blog is a forum for exploring these questions and some possible answers and deeper understanding. Guest articles are welcome, and we will provide links to relevant articles in these pages.

Your editor is Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein Waters, team member of PACT and mother to two young sons. I experienced a dramatic story of parental child abduction as a child, and my work today is focused on enlightening the public about what it is like to be a child caught in the middle of a conflict between parents.

As there are so many variables and every story is unique, I cannot possibly claim to understand the scope of it all. I simply attempt to scratch the surface and begin a dialogue which I hope will be fruitful for all who join in.

In the pages to come, I will interweave my own story as a means to opening up a wider discussion and exploration of this sensitive and difficult subject.

Welcome!

First Blog Entry

Hello and welcome to the first, of many blog entries on the PACT site.

Please watch this space for news and events concerning missing childern.