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Home › Articles › Toddler Nutrition › Parental Abduction

Parental Abduction

When Parents Kidnap Their Own

By Carma Haley

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An estimated 355,000 children are abducted from their homes each year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). These children can go days, weeks, months or even years with no contact from anyone except their abductor. And many of these children are not taken by strangers: They are abducted by their own parents.

There are some who claim kidnapping their own children is the only option they have, but what about the other parent -- and what about the child?

Girl on porch.Mark Samrodan, spokesman for NCMEC, says parental kidnapping is the practice of a noncustodial parent taking a child from the custodial parent from one state to another without court permission or in violation of court orders obtained through a divorce or custody hearing. The practice of parental kidnapping is forbidden by both federal and state laws in the absence of a provable emergency situation and can result in the noncustodial parent being charged with felony kidnapping. But often this threat does not stop parental kidnapping from occurring.

Who Kidnaps?
Research completed by the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrown-away Children (NISMART), which was founded by the United States Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, states there are many reasons parents may resort to abducting their children. These reasons include using a child as a "pawn" in contentious divorce proceedings, as an extension of battering, to control their spouse or ex-spouse by depriving them of custody or visitation of the child, or to protect the child from abuse.

"My husband and I obtained legal custody of our granddaughter when it was determined that her mom was unable to take care of her," says Shirley Sunderland, from Altoona, Pa. "When the baby was 3 months old I was working at the local hospital and often had difficulty finding a sitter for the evening shift. [My daughter] offered to take care of her for that one night. When I got home, the baby was gone and so were some of her belongings. I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach and then realized that the baby had been kidnapped by her own mother."


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Parental Abduction by ncmec.eu on 11/11/2009 02:51AM

Your readers may be interested to learn that most publicized cases of alleged parental abduction do not end in conviction, at least in part because the charges are often based on one parent's fraudulent statements to prosecutors. In addition, fingerprinting does not help solve child abduction. It only helps to identify dead bodies. It is extremely rare for a child abduction to end in the child's death, especially if the child is taken by a parent. Finally it bears mentioning that many of the children who are advertised by major child welfare organizations as 'missing' are not actually missing. Unfortunately these groups have a self-serving financial interest in inflating their statistics. The location of many of the children we see advertised on posters is actually known. These are cases of missing child fraud, which are cataloged on our website. Thank you. Michael ncmec.eu

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