Battered Women, Their Children, and International Law: The Unintended Consequences of the Hague Child Abduction Convention

4 | Child Exposure to Abduction and Domestic Violence

101 Up to this point, we have focused primarily on the experiences of mothers in Hague petition cases. In this chapter we explore the situations of the children who fled with their mothers. We review research on parental abduction and the effects of exposure to domestic violence for children to set the stage for the children’s experiences and how these relate to the critical issue of grave risk in Hague Convention cases. Parental Abduction The definitions of parental abduction vary, and some are so broad as to include keeping a child for one night longer than permitted on a visit. For the purposes of this study, however, we adopted Finkelhor, Hotaling, and Sedlak’s (1991) policy-focused and narrower definition. Using this definition, parental abductions occur when one of three conditions is met: “(a) an attempt was made to conceal the taking or the whereabouts of the child and to prevent contact with the child; or (b) the child was transported out of state; or (c) there was evidence that the abductor had intended to keep the child indefinitely or permanently affect custodial privileges” (p. 808). Abductions are sometimes labeled family abductions because extended family members, such as grandparents, often help in the process of removing or retaining children. In Hague Convention cases, because international borders are crossed, the separation from a left-behind parent may be permanent, with only periodic visits possible. The literature on parental abduction is limited to a series of case studies and surveys of parents, most of whom were left-behind and not taking parents. These studies are fraught with methodological problems, and many are now two decades old, but they do shed some light on how abducted children and leftbehind parents are affected by abductions, as we will briefly summarize here. 4 Child Exposure to Abduction and Domestic Violence 102 | Chapter 4 Effects on Children The effects of parental abduction on children can vary, based on the nature and length of the abduction, age of the child, whether siblings were also abducted, and children’s awareness of the abduction (Cole & Bradford, 1992; Greif, 2009). For example, a study of 20 Canadian families with 37 children abducted by mostly male, non-custodial parents (Cole & Bradford, 1992) found few differences between abducted and non-abducted, control children. However, the abductions in this study were often very brief (65% were less than a week), siblings often were abducted together, and one-third of the children did not know that what happened to them was an abduction. Other research has included longer abductions, often of only one child. For example, Forehand, Long, Zogg, and Parrish (1989) studied 23 abducted children in 17 families by asking left-behind parents to complete several questionnaires after the return of their children. Of 48 parents who received the mailed questionnaires, only 17 returned completed surveys (a low 35% response rate). These left-behind parents retrospectively rated their children on a 48-item Parent Rating Scale, with subscales focused on conduct and learning problems, psychosomatic complaints, impulsive hyperactivity , and anxiety. Parents rated their children as showing significantly more problems post-abduction when compared to pre-abduction on all four subscales , and improving to somewhere in between pre- and post-abduction levels at the time of the survey (between 3 and 26 months after the abduction; mean was 10.8 months post-abduction). The authors point out, however, that even at the worst point (post-abduction), parents’ ratings indicated their children showed only slight problems. In other research from the same period, Sagatun and Barrett’s (1990) study of 43 abductions in northern California is one of few in which mothers were the majority of abductors studied (25 mothers versus 18 fathers). According to the coauthors, professionals who had worked with the children reported varied impacts of the abductions: Some [children] longed to remain with the abducting parent, while others were happy to return to the victim parent. Some children had been severely traumatized by the abduction or concealment, and many will be unable to recover from the loss of a long separation from one parent. Some were terrorized or tortured through the lies they were told and by the manipulation of their identities in the process of concealment. In some cases their childhood had been stolen from them by parents who severely over-identified with them. A few children weathered the abduction experience relatively unscathed, these were usually children whose [18.221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:30 GMT...