Parental child abduction is child abduction by a parent. It often occurs when the parents separate or begin divorce proceedings. One parent may remove or retain the child from the other seeking to gain an advantage in expected or pending child-custodyproceedings or because that parent fears losing the child in those expected or pending child-custody proceedings; a parent may refuse to return a child at the end of an access visit or may flee with the child to prevent an access visit or fear of domestic violence and abuse.
Child abduction may also occur when a child has been, is about to be or parent(s) fear that s/he will be, taken into care of the competent authorities, usually due to child endangerment proceedings.
Definitions and legal considerations
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is required by the 1984 Missing Children’s Assistance Act Pub.L. 98–473 to report on child abductions and gathers statistics on, among other types of incidents, those where anyone with blood or legal ties to the custodial parent or the custodial parent’s romantic partner took or tried to take the child from the parent’s custody. The most recent version of this reportfound that rates of family abductions remained relatively stable, with an estimated rate of 3 children per 1,000 involved in an episode of family abduction in 2013 not significantly increased from the 2.7 children per 1,000 reported in 1999. Only 24.2% of family abductions surveyed in this study were reported to police and arrests were made in only 1.5% of these abductions. Only a small minority of family abductions involved attempts to take the child to another state or country.
Depending on the laws of the state and country in which the parental abduction occurs, this may or may not constitute a criminal offense. For example, removal of a child from the UK for a period of 28 days or more without the permission of the other parent (or person with parental responsibility) is a criminal offense. In many states of the United States, if there is no formal custody order, and the parents are not living together, the removal of a child by one parent is not an offense. In Australia the absconding parent, usually the mother, is awarded with the Family Court’s presumption of residency status quo after keeping the child for a minimum of three weeks.
Many US states have criminalized interstate child abduction. The first state to pass a parental kidnapping prevention law was California. Written by Larry Synclair, the father of a child abducted to Russia, the law was called the Synclair-Cannon Act. Texas soon followed. Teresa Laudedale, also a parent, litigated to prevent the abduction of her children, along with Cathy Brown. They made many enhancements to the Synclair-Cannon Act, which resulted in the creation of a prevention law for Texas. Lauderdale and Brown encouraged Brown’s former attorney to take it to National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL); he is a Texas commissioner with NCCUSL. NCCUSL drafted a uniform state law dealing with parental abduction, UCAPA (Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act). By 2010 about nine states had adopted UCAPA, while many more have pending legislation