Report to the GOvernor

CHILD ABDUCTION AND PARENTAL ALIENATION

A few words about abduction and alienation. Brittany and Dawna, and those who participated in the scheme to abduct McKinley are child abusers. Period.

In divorce, children often will side with one parent over the other. It has nothing to do with fault or perceived fault and it has nothing to do with which parent (if either) is the “better” parent. It has everything to do with insecurity. A child clings to a parent as a safety blanket. 

In thirty-two years of law practice and in observing my father practice Family Law, I see this frequently. What I also see frequently is the parent receiving the affection use it to batter the other parent. It becomes evidence of some unknown abuse or a basis for not exchanging the child. All of which greatly harms the child.

It has been only in the last decade that family courts have learned to recognize the psychology of preference and the abuses of it through alienation or abduction. Apparently, such education has not yet come to Arizona. Children are routinely damaged, some severely, by an antiquated system with no accountability.

Arizona has the second highest per capita rate of parental child abduction in the country.

As of 2022:

• In the US, 2,300      children are reported missing per day 
• In the US, nearly      400,000 youth were abducted in 2020
• Three in      every thousand children are abducted by a family member each year
• Strangers      abduct less than 1% of missing children
• Parents are      accountable for over 90% of abductions.

In most jurisdictions, the failure to abide by a court’s custody order gets the local police at your door. If you do not exchange your child as required by the court’s order, they will do it for you. Not the City of Mesa. By some unwritten policy, Mesa will not honor custody orders. Neither will the Town of Gilbert. Even if a Superior Court judge were to order the local police to obtain an abducted child, neither Mesa nor Gilbert officials would comply.

The greatest pain a parent can ever feel is losing a child. The second greatest pain is the abduction of their child. Imagine. Your child is out there, somewhere in the world. Scared. Hurt. Confused. And wondering where you are and why you didn’t protect him. Every day, I live with this pain.

Children who have been psychologically violated and maltreated through the act of abduction, are more likely to exhibit a variety of psychological and social handicaps. These handicaps make them vulnerable to detrimental outside influences (Rand, 1997). Huntington (1982) lists some of the deleterious effects of parental child abduction on the child victim:

1. Depression;
2. Loss of community;
3. Loss of stability, security, and trust;
4. Excessive fearfulness, even of ordinary occurrences;
5. Loneliness;
6. Anger;
7. Helplessness;
8. Disruption in identity formation; and
9. Fear of abandonment.

"Because of the harmful effects on children, parental kidnapping has been characterized as a form of child abuse" reports Patricia Hoff, Legal Director for the Parental Abduction Training and Dissemination Project, American Bar Association on Children and the Law. Hoff explains:

"Abducted children suffer emotionally and sometimes physically at the hands of abductor-parents. Many children are told the other parent is dead or no longer loves them. Uprooted from family and friends, abducted children often are given new names by their abductor-parents and instructed not to reveal their real names or where they lived before." (Hoff, 1997)

As an early leader in the relatively new field of parental child abduction issues, Dr. Dorothy Huntington wrote an article published in 1982, Parental Kidnapping: A New Form of Child Abuse. Huntington contends that from the point of view of the child, "child stealing is child abuse." According to Huntington, "in child stealing the children are used as both objects and weapons in the struggle between the parents which leads to the brutalization of the children psychologically, specifically destroying their sense of trust in the world around them." Because of the events surrounding parental child abduction, Huntington emphasizes that "we must reconceptualize child stealing as child abuse of the most flagrant sort" (Huntington, 1982, p. 7). 

A study entitled Prevention of Parent or Family Abduction through Early Identification of Risk Factors was conducted by Dr. Janet Johnston (Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition) and Dr. Linda Girdner (ABA Center on Children and the Law). The researchers detailed multiple risk parent profiles for abduction:

1. Have threatened to abduct or abducted previously;
2. Are suspicious and distrustful due to a belief abuse has occurred;
3. Are paranoid-delusional;
4. Are sociopathic;
5. Have strong ties to another country; and
6. Feel disenfranchised from the legal system.