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Child abduction is the criminal offense of unlawfully removing or wrongfully retaining a person under the age of eighteen. The term child abduction is separated into two distinct contexts: abduction by members of the child’s family or abduction by strangers. Of these two, parental abductions occur most often by far, with more than 200,000 cases a year.
Parental child abduction is the unauthorized custody of a child by a family relative without parental consent and disobeying the family law ruling, which may have removed the child from the care, access, and contact of the other parental figure and family side.
Revolving around the issue of parental separation or divorce, such parental or familial child abduction may create parental alienation, a psychological form of child abuse seeking to disconnect a child from the targeted parent and denigrated side of the family using manipulation. It usually occurs when the parents are separating or begin the process of divorce.
A parent may the child from the other with aspirations to gain an advantage in expected or pending child-custody proceedings or because that parent fears losing the child; a parent may refuse to return a child at the end of an access visit or may run off with the child as prevention of a future visit or because of fear of domestic violence and abuse.
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Parental abduction has been classified as child abuse nonetheless when viewed from the perspective of the kidnapped child. But surprisingly, most parental abductions are resolved quickly, unlike stranger abductions, unfortunately.
Studies performed for the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reported that in 1999, 53% percent of family abducted children were gone less than one week, and 21% were gone for one month or more.
Abduction or kidnapping by strangers on the other hand is somewhat rare. Some of the reasons why a stranger might kidnap a random child include: blackmail the parents for money for the child's return and safety, illegal adoption, or a stranger steals a child with the intent to rear the child as their own or to sell to a potential adoptive parent or parents, human trafficking, stealing a child with the intent to exploit the child themselves or through trade to a person who will abuse the child through slavery, forced labor, or sexual abuse.
The earliest nationally publicized kidnapping of a child by a stranger for the purpose of extracting a ransom payment from the parents was the Pool case in the year 1819, in Baltimore, Maryland. Margaret Pool, a 20 month-old baby, was kidnapped on May 20 by an individual with the name of Nancy Gamble and secreted with the assistance of Marie Thomas. On May 22, 1819, the parents, James and Mary Pool, placed an advertisement in the Baltimore Patriot newspaper announcing a $20 reward for Mary's return. When the child was recovered on May 23, through the efforts of members of the community who conducted a thorough search, it was revealed that the child had been badly whipped by Gamble and bore bloody wounds.
Both Gamble and Thomas were tried for the crime of kidnapping and were found guilty. The motive for the crime was proved to be due to financial problems. She had kidnapped the child with the intention of waiting for a reward to be offered, they would return the child and collect the money. This is a scandalous technique favored by many ransom child kidnappers before the use of written ransom demands became the new preferred method. Nancy Gamble's crime and succeeding trial were reported in detail in Baltimore Patriot. The June 26th article, as well as others on the case that had appeared in the Patriot, were reprinted in newspapers in other states including Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington D.C.
A very small number of abductions result from - in most cases - women who kidnap babies to raise as their own. These women are often unable to have children of their own or have miscarried, and seek to satisfy their unmet psychological need by abducting a child rather than by adopting. The crime is often premeditated, with the woman often simulating pregnancy to reduce suspicion when a baby suddenly appears in the household.
Historically, a few states have practiced child abduction for indoctrination purposes, as a form of punishment for political opponents, or for profit. Notable cases include the kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany, the lost children of Francoism, during which an estimated 300,000 children were abducted from their parents, and the about 500 'Children of the Disappeared ' who were adopted by the military in the Argentine Dirty War. In Australia, the 'stolen generation' is the term given to native Aboriginal children who were forcibly abducted or whose mothers gave consent by force or misleading information so the government could assimilate the black population into the white majority. Some other abductions have been to make kids available by child-selling for adoption by other people, without adopting parents necessarily being aware of how children were actually made available for adoption.
Neonatal infant abduction and prenatal fetal abduction are the earliest ages of child abduction when a child is expansively defined as a viable baby before birth through the age of majority. In addition, embryo theft and even oocyte misappropriation in reproductive medical settings have been legalistically construed as child abduction.
Launched in 1998 as a joint venture of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children and NCMEC, the Global Missing Children's Network is a network of countries that connect, share best practices, and disseminate information and images of missing children to improve the effectiveness and success rate of missing children investigations.
Each country can access a customizable website platform and can enter missing children's information into a centralized, multilingual database that has photos of and information about missing children, which can be viewed and distributed to assist in location and recovery efforts. GMCN staff train new countries joining the Network, and provide an annual member conference sponsored by Motorola Solutions Foundation at which best practices, current issues, trends, policies, procedures, and possible solutions are discussed.
Child Abduction and Criminal Offense. (2024, Feb 02). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/child-abduction-and-criminal-offense-essay
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