Child Abduction Watch, Part II

Child Abduction Watch, Part II - A few days ago, we discussed the case of Bonnie Rubinstein, a Connecticut woman who abducted her and her ex-husband's child and fled to Belgium after custody of the boy was awarded to the father. She kidnapped the boy with the help of an international ring of child-snatchers.

I was planning on writing, eventually, a piece on how the media's perceptions of the issue color their coverage of child-abduction and, less dramatically, family court. Courts on their own are biased against fathers. When it comes to kidnapping, it's much, much worse.

Now, read this article in the Strib, about an Italian woman who lost her custody case, and ran off to Minnesota, thumbing her nose at the Italian court. Notice all the sympathy for her case inherent in the array of quotes the Strib chooses to include in this story:

Frank Concedda is described as bright and brave, a ballplayer, computer user and, at age 9, the center of an international custody dispute in northern Minnesota.

And so Frank -- Francisco, formally -- bade a tearful farewell to his mother in Bagley, Minn., on Tuesday and headed with his father for Italy, a country where his mother could face kidnapping charges if she were to follow.

Frank's journey is the result of a judge's decision that was based on international law, not on what was best for Frank or what he wanted. And that's the way the system is designed to work, a family law expert said.

Note the buttons being pushed:

• Bright, Brave, Ballplaying Boy...
• Tearfully being wrenched away from Mom - MOM!, I tell you...
• because the big bad system is actually designed to do things this way!, because
• the mother might actually face criminal consequences - for committing a criminal act!

Imagine, for a moment, how the story would be covered if the father had taken the kid and run.

Oh, wait - you don't have to imagine. It happened earlier this week, also in the Strib. Note the complete absence of the symbols of sympathy and bathos when it's the father who takes the child and runs.

What the Strib only hints at very obliquely in the Concedda story is that the mother kidnapped the child, and thumbed her nose at international law in so doing. In the meantime, we're subjected to all sorts of blandishments - by a writer in editorial mode, no less - about the "best interest of the child" (which is a legal standard, not a platitude). Ignored are the possibilities that:

• the father is not a complete bastard, and living with him won't harm the child one bit,
• living on the run from the law, in a trailer in Bagley, MN, just might not be entirely in the child's best interest, no matter how many dewy-eyed references to bikes and baseball you throw into your story.

More - much more - to come.

Posted by Mitch at July 31, 2002 07:19 AM