-Glenn Sacks
There apparently will be a happy ending for David Goldman, who fought a long, internationally-publicized battle to get his kidnapped son Sean returned to him from Brazil. A Brazilian court has ruled that the David should get custody of the 8-year-old, and ordered his immediate return. The new decision is being covered by hundreds of media outlets–the Associated Press’ story on the case is here.
To their credit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the U.S. House and Senate had called on Brazil to permit the boy’s return, and it was this international pressure which tilted the scales in David’s favor. But would they have gotten involved if the boy’s mother hadn’t died? Would David Goldman have been successful in a custody case against the child’s mother, instead of his stepfather? It is unlikely.
Fathers whose children have been taken to other states or countries surreptitiously and/or against court orders face a long, uphill battle to get them back. Authorities generally give them the cold shoulder and the police don’t want to get involved. Our organization hears from thousands of fathers whose children have been taken away against court orders, and there are very few resources available to help.
There are roughly 350,000 child abductions in the United States each year, most of them carried out by family members. According to the US Department of Justice, mothers and fathers abduct their children in equal numbers. Since custodial mothers outnumber custodial fathers four to one, custodial fathers are at a much higher risk of having their children abducted by noncustodial mothers than custodial mothers are of having their children abducted by noncustodial fathers.
Sean Goldman’s mother took him on vacation to Brazil in June 2004, but instead of returning to New Jersey, she divorced David Goldman and remarried in Brazil. The mother’s new husband–Sean’s stepfather–refused to return the boy to his father.
The US government’s keen interest in supporting an American father in a custody battle against a stepfather can be contrasted with a similarly outrageous case which pitted an American father against a mother who kidnapped her child to Israel. The case led to the passage of California SB 1082, a military parents bill, and was covered by FOX, the Los Angeles Daily News & others.
In that case, similarly under the pretense of a vacation, a mother abducted her young son to Israel while her husband Gary, a San Diego-based US Navy SEAL, was deployed in Afghanistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Despite Gary’s entreaties for assistance and long, unblemished Navy career, his son was never returned to the US. He has been allowed scant contact with him over the years. In a newspaper interview, Gary said:
Sometimes I wonder what I risked my life [in Afghanistan] for. I went to fight for freedom but what freedom and what rights mean anything if a man doesn’t have the right to be a father to his own child?
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Glenn Sacks is the National Executive Director of Fathers and Families. His own website can be see at www.GlennSacks.com.
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