P.A.R.E.N.T. International Abduction Conference, May 11-13, 2000
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My first impression of P.A.R.E.N.T. International's "Bringing Them Home" Abduction Conference (May 11-13, 2000), was that one could cut the grief in the air with a knife. We've heard of a broken spirit, and there were many at the conference, but here was a spirit of despair known only to those who have lost a child.
For us, life, the way one normally imagines it, stopped abruptly when our children were taken. Look into someone's eyes and where once a dazzling light had shown, now flickers an ember fanned by the dying gasps of a hope floating on a pool of sleepless nightmares. One recalls the uncomprehending emptiness in the eyes of abandoned children on Brazilian streets. What irony: what they are missing is their parents; what we are missing is our children.
We smile, but it is only a muscular exercise acknowledging a formality. Any expression of genuine happiness might make us stop thinking of our children, for however brief a moment, and that alone would defile their memory. We fear anything that might chip away at our most precious possession which is that fading memory of our children, frozen in time on the last day we saw them.
There is a bond of desperation between the parents. We are people who cannot hear the word "mommy" or "daddy" on the street without seeing the entire lives of our children flash before our eyes and crash to an unknown end in one tragic moment. We are the people who count the days until the day AFTER Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter! We are the people who have shed more tears than anyone on the planet. And we're in one room together. Yes, we have something in common.
Many, perhaps most, have turned their lives to the endless task of retrieving their children. Of righting this grievous wrong. It has become their lifelong project and resulted in worthy organizations being founded. While I type this, I look around me and find few remnants of my own life before the event that divided it into two parts: before and after the abduction. Around me are piles of books, brochures, flyers, and newspaper clippings, all about parental kidnapping. Pictures of missing children, little scraps of paper with scribbled tidbits of information, any of which might hold the key to recovering my daughters.
I can't help noticing that two-thirds of the conference attendees are women. Are men abducting their children at a greater rate, I wonder? Does that say something about the system? It seems that about two-thirds of the attendees have had no contact with their children since the abduction-- but this statistic crosses gender lines. I'm fortunate in having had a couple telephone calls in the seven months that my children have been kidnapped. I'm humbled by the parents who have heard nothing in five or more years or don't even know the whereabouts of their children.
Throughout the three days we heard conference moderator Doug Deforest's moving song "Bringing them Home," profits from the sale of which go to benefit P.A.R.E.N.T. (Parents Advocating for Recovery through Education by Networking Together). He also showed us a video PSA in which the song appeared.
Pat Roush is responsible for much of the present day legislation concerning child abduction having been passed into law. She opened the conference on Thursday with the somber reminder that "no one is interested unless it effects them." She explained the status of the US government's position, identifying the good guys and the bad guys for newcomers like me, and outlining strategies. In closing she encouraged us with Winston Churchill's "Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up!" Pat's children have been gone for more than a decade!
The next speaker, immigration law specialist, Michael Wildes, gave us legal pointers urging us to prosecute the abductors and admonishing us to teach our children how to make collect calls-- something that many longed to have done in retrospect.
After lunch Bill Hagmaier, Unit Chief of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime talked of a recent encounter with 500 parents, "all of whom had a murdered child!"
On Friday, Duncan Ranton, a British lawyer specializing in Hague Convention cases, opened the day with an explanation of several case histories he had recently been involved with.
Next, Tim Maier, taught us "How to Talk to the Media." A tireless advocate for abducted children, Tim has penned eight articles in Insight Magazine that have resulted in governmental investigations into the problem of America's stolen children. He is a hero and received a hero's welcome. Tim gave us 21 ways to court the media starting with "Reporters love to eat-- try to have a lunch date with them."
Friday's second high-point was Pamela Stuart-Mills. Pamela is the Executive Director of the Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) Research Foundation in Washington, D.C. She cautioned us with the bleak warning that when and if we recover our children's bodies, their minds may remain abducted. She referred to noted Christian author Thomas Merton by way of explanation: The children's center of identity is experienced through someone else. The children see the world through the eyes and filters of the abducting parent. They lose the ability to be themselves, and it takes years to undo this. When a child learns to live through someone else's identity they sacrifice their own thoughts-- you get back a shell. The children's emotional development stops the day they were kidnapped. Pamela should know. It is with great effort that she has been able to successfully integrate with three of her four abducted children.
David Levy, executive director of the Children's Rights Council also briefly spoke on Friday. So did David Kempler, about Non-profits and lobbying. Unfortunately, Dr. Nancy Faulkner, author of the celebrated "Parental Abduction is Child Abuse," available to read on the web, could not attend because of illness.
Lorraine Clough, a private Hague investigator from the UK, contracted to locate internationally kidnapped children in Hague cases, reported on Mexico's compliance with the Hague treaty, arguing that Mexico, often thought to be non-compliant, is actually more compliant that the US in returning US citizens.
Later, Adrianne Delgardo warned us in advance that the song she intended to sing would move us to tears. It did.
Friday night closed with a bell ringing ceremony for the 250 abducted children whose T-shirts are part of Margaret Maclain's Missing Children's Clothesline project. She read the names of each child, pausing to allow everyone in attendance to ring a bell for that child. When a child's left-behind parent or grandparent was present, they came to the front of the hall accompanied by more bell-ringing. In the end, nearly everyone was standing up front with linked arms. We made a circle-- a big one-- and held hands, everyone crying as Doug Deforest sang "Bringing Them Home" while accompanying himself on keyboard. Standing, weeping, hand-in-hand in a circle like that tells me to do one thing: Pray!
Saturday brought us Steven Nunnally, the illustrious "BaddTeddy" of the Knights of Kindness who had tirelessly visited 80 senators offices the day before, lobbying for Vivian's Law. Vivian's law, named after John Trout's twice-abducted daughter, is modeled after a California law that allows district attorneys to step in to help in international parental child abduction cases. I hope that it would also educate the district attorneys to prevent them from inadvertently aiding abductors as happened in my case.
Next we learned about abduction recovery services through the eyes of the philanthropic Gus, another one of the movement's heros, who explained that only 5 out 82 such organizations have so far proven themselves effective. He provided a list of red flags to aid us in making such determinations in advance.
Several presentations were clearly designed to inform us of the perspective from the abductor's point of view, Lee Coburn's inflammatory "An Abductor Tells His Story" on Friday and Ingrid Horton's Saturday presentation, "Social Anthropology of Germany: Gender Bias." Outlining a history of government intervention in parental matters stretching back to 1934, Ingrid uncovered a convincing pattern of social programs underwriting German non-compliance to the Hague Convention.
After lunch, P.A.R.E.N.T. founder and conference organizer Maureen Dabbagh spoke about profiling abduction cases to plan and implement a successful recovery strategy. She pointed out that "Parents are going to stop spending their life savings" as most of those present have already done. The grandparents of one conference attendee sold their wedding rings to raise the funds to allow their son to attend the conference. Alarmingly, she also revealed that the number of covert recovery operations has shifted to Hague Convention signatory countries in 1999. Obviously, the Hague Convention has failed miserably.
For readers hearing the term Hague Convention for the first time, maybe I should explain. The Hague Convention is an international treaty mandating that a foreign country where a child spent their last six months of residence overrides the country of their birth and citizenship, in effect, canceling out a child's nationality. Sound ridiculous? It is. That's why most of the signatory countries pay no attention to it when it involves their own citizens and have an average 24% compliance rate (Germany's is 9%). Unfortunately, the US has a 90-94% compliance rate, and foreign citizens (typically European mothers and Arabian fathers) with full support of their governments use this treaty as a powerful tool in kidnapping American children.
Consider the following scenarios. A family travels overseas because of a temporary business transfer, a term in the military, or an educational fellowship. If one spouse doesn't want to return to the US, and the family has spent a minimum of 6 months abroad, the Hague Treaty declares that the other spouse has no rights whatsoever to bring the children back to their home country. In fact, in cases involving the United States, where the other spouse takes the children back to their home country, the governments of both countries will spare no expense to prevent the homecoming, even going so far as jailing American citizens who are simply returning home with their American-born and raised children. I know this from personal experience.
Tom Johnson was the final individual presenter. Many are familiar with the case of his daughter, Amanda, abducted to Sweden five years ago, because of the media publicity of his unceasing recovery efforts. Tom reiterated the fact that the US is a one-way street in the extradition process. America is the only country that will extradite their own child citizens. The United Nations rightfully consider the problem to be a human rights issue whereas the United States doesn't. In fact, the US has not signed the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child although the US upholds the treaty better than most signatory nations.
The final event was a panel discussion/Q-and-A period moderated by Lillah Bezara and consisting of Maureen Dabbagh (Recovery Profiling, USA), Lorraine Clough (Hague Investigator, UK), Gus Zamora (International Child Recovery), Tom Johns (Attorney, Child's Rights), Pamela Stuart-Mills, (Executive Director, NPAF), and Duncan Ranton (Barrister and Solicitor, Hague/UK).
Other participants/presenters included Allison Kulpra, from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in Phoenix, Arizona, who presented her film "Taking Back Our Children." "K.C." presented and signed his book, "Where's Daddy" while Lee Coburn did the same for his "Runaway Father " as did Pat Rousch for her "Alia's Rainbow." David Stanton of Blue Sky Access (www.blueskyaccess.net) made a generous offer to donate funds for the cause from subscribers to his ISP, already committed to exposing missing children's pictures on the web.
Noticeably absent from the entire event was the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. While the NCMEC appears to be effective in domestic cases, their international division has a good deal to learn, my own case being a shining example of the type of tragic errors they have made in this arena. Here again, they missed a golden opportunity to learn about the territory.
The International Abduction Conference officially closed with a candlelight vigil at the White House. Margaret McClain's Clothesline Project was displayed in conjunction with the vigil. Margaret had spent the past 5 months painting and decorating 240 T-shirts with a missing child's name and photo on one side and the country and date of abduction on the other. About ten other people had brought similar T-shirts to the conference.
These 250 T-shirts, we attached to a 600-foot clothes line with poles spaced every 5 shirts. This we carried to the White House. It was quite a moving sight. We marched the clothesline around in front of the White house for hours, chanting "Bring our children home!" and singing "Who Hears the Cries of the Little Children" by Craig Deanto (click for a photo of Craig Deanto and Christopher Yavelow at the event). President Clinton and Chelsea came out and watched for a while. Hillary didn't. Perhaps she was in New York. Here is a video of the Clothesline project.
I believe that everyone present would agree with Eileen Lukeman who said, "The love that was felt all around, nothing could stop. The heat, the rain, could not put out the candles in our hearts. To see other people just join in, was something that I will never forget."
"Bringing Them Home" (click to repeat the song)
Doug Deforest and Friends
Hype Records
Forsey/Deforest
Official P.A.R.E.N.T. Theme
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