There’s been an awful lot of Parental Kidnapping in the news – for the past 130 years or so. Most people will be surprised to find out just how long this lamentable phenomenon has been going strong. Three decades ago, during a period when there was a palpable surge of news reports of PK cases as well as articles describing the problem as a whole, PK earned the designation “epidemic of the 80’s.” Yet most of us would be surprised to learn that this “epidemic” moniker applies just as aptly to the eighteen–eighties, when news stories about PK cases started to rapidly increase, when plays, novels and short stories about PK were commonplace – and when the nation’s first law specifically aimed at curbing PK was passed by Connecticut (in 1885). Ever since the 1850s, newspapers had been reporting routine arrests – under standard kidnapping laws – of fathers and mothers for having abducted their own child. In 1852, a Mr. Byrne had been nabbed for “stealing & decoying away” his child in Brooklyn and in 1862 Mrs. Rice, a socialite from one of the most prominent families of Boston was locked up for the “abduction” of her son which had been witnessed by the boy’s schoolmate, the future senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

The storied legacy of PK is a long, rich and profoundly instructive one. Familiarity with this legacy can shed more than a little light on the current shaky predicament in which the American (and increasingly non–American) family finds itself. In the present day, we can expect to see some form of popular culture representation of PK (movie, play, juvenile or adult novel, TV fiction, comic book, docudrama) appear about once every five days (not counting talk TV, TV news magazines and special reports, “Wanted” shows, etc.). Yet despite the intense public interest that the existence of these productions attests to, no history has yet been written on PK (with the exception of one brief and error–ridden example).

This odd omission is all the more strange when we consider the variety of off- the- beaten- track – and often fascinating – history books that are being published lately. If you want to read about the history of a solitary foodstuff, you have your pick between recent specialized studies on the history of corn, the potato, chocolate, salt, sugar. Or if your curiosity hankers after a more social subject you can read a book devoted to the history of intoxication, loafing, the smile, or left–handedness. And for the hardy reader there are even more rarefied historical volumes such as Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600–1770; Washed Up: The Curious Journeys of Flotsam and Jetsam; Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition; and Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants.

Yet our subject, the history of Parental Kidnapping is virtually a taboo subject among professional historians as well as writers for the popular market and thus the subject continues to be shrouded in darkness.

We should not assume that this silence – this lack of interest from universities in particular – is due to a perception by scholars of the family that the topic is trivial. Rather, it is the very recognition of the issue’s extraordinary relevance to the travails of the contemporary family that keeps the history of PK in willful obscurity. No topic is more political than the family. The problematic relationship between family and government has been hotly debated at least as far back as Plato and has been fiercely controversial throughout the United States’ entire existence.

Government often comes into conflict with the sanctity of the family. In the 20th century, forced family dismemberment was a central policy goal for the Russian Soviet Socialist and German National Socialist governments, and in the United States was central to such governmental institutions as slavery, “child saving,” forced sterilization programs, and the removal of American Indian children from their families and cultures to be housed and reprogrammed with “white” values in boarding schools. Still many present-day education policy makers see the family and the state as on a direct collision part. Mary Jo Bane, former Assistant Secretary For Children And Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appointed by the president in 1993, is famous for her futuristic 1977 pronouncement that “in order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” [Associated Press, Aug. 21]

Parental Kidnapping is seldom a purely unilateral act. Laws, policies, bureaucracies and professional interests shape the process and its outcome in frequently unplanned and unpredictable ways. Thus we must always keep in mind the vested interests of outsiders whether they be governmental or private, when we attempt to uncover the real goings on in any particular PK case. The legal system’s preference for easy to digest stereotypes that can be applied to disputed child access cases – such as “good parent v bad parent” or “pair of equally uncooperative parents” – serve the bureaucratic needs of pigeon–holers quite well, but in reality apply to fewer cases than we are usually led to believe.

In these politically charged times that are so dangerous to family forming and family preservation we must alert ourselves to the presence of a pervasive myth taught in many of our colleges. The myth goes something like this: “Parental love for children, especially babies, is ‘learned behavior,’ and the farther back in time we go the less parental love there was.” Those who are attracted to the myth are typically professors who are steeped in a belief system which holds that all human action is economically determined. Some of these writers treat family affection as an example of mere “role playing,” that has no basis in human nature; indeed the very notion of “human nature” is frequently and unapologetically jettisoned by scholars. Given the popularity in the university setting of the myth that parental love is a recent social “invention” is it any wonder that the complex subject of Parental Kidnapping would be seen as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst?

Typically, those who promote the “role–playing” explanation for human existence place exaggerated emphasis on differences – real or imagined – between the sexes. Published writing on PK is littered with distortions stemming from assumptions about these supposed differences. Yet much of the un–pruned – and yet to be ambitiously explored – historical record suggests that both sexes face similar moral challenges and both sexes produce people who are courageous or cowardly, self–centered or generous, impatient or patient, honest or deceitful, violent or placid, boastful or modest, and all the other shades in the spectrum of moral character. Nature and nurture operate together at all times in complex ways.

Let’s begin to take a look, then, at the historical artifacts that have yet to be explored. Here is a pair of newspaper photos that could – individually – easily fit nicely into any webpage on fathers’ rights in the first instance or on feminism in the second, yet where could we ever expect to see them presented together?

Far too often Parental Kidnapping is discussed in oppositional terms: father vs. mother, unmarried parent vs. would-be adopter, child vs. parent(s), “primary caretaker” vs. “visitor.”

will make an effort to introduce a more complex image of the tragedy of family dismemberment. If there is to be any honest effort in our society to prevent PK, we must come to a point where we intimately understand the interrelating mentalities, motives, beliefs, character differences and outside influences upon all the family members involved. The painful subject of family dissolution involving children is one deserving of our devoted attention because family is forever – no matter what degree of conscious or unconscious estrangement (even death) bears down upon it, family origin and identity can never be truly eradicated.

Old newspapers can tell us a great deal about everyday life, not only about the actions which were at the time thought worthy of note, but also about what people were thinking, feeling and fearing. The little 1906 article below – which was reprinted throughout the country in a number of small–town newspapers – gives a glimpse of just how deeply ingrained the idea that one parent might have “custody” and the other be excluded, is.

If we are ever going to get to the root of family dismemberment – if we are ever going to find out how we got to where we are today – we must dig eagerly, courageously, and thoroughly into the past.

Today, we have tools to perform such a task that were undreamed of only twenty years ago. The digital revolution is going to transform the way researched on the history of modern life is thought about and written. Amateur genealogists, who by definition have a profound respect for the natural family that is lacking among many professors of history, are leading the way in the exploration of fact–based, rather than theory-bound research on the history of ordinary people and everyday life. The internet, as it continues to grow and to influence the way we handle information, promises to gradually develop what might be dubbed a genealogy without boundary, an uncensored history of ordinary people without censorship – one that is concerned with discovering the reality of our ancestors rather than with consolidating rationales to be deployed in future government policy.

For those tens of millions of us who have been harshly touched in our personal legacies of shattered families, the pursuit of the history of the broken family is a way to seek out – and come to terms with – aspects of our own fragmented identities.

People’s personal need to grapple with their own tragic legacies stands behind some of the most ambitious genealogically oriented projects. Jewish victims of German National Socialism’s efforts to engineer the populations they governed (and those they conquered) have in particular set a standard of critical inquiry for all who have had their family ravaged by forced separations – whether initiated by a single family member as in PK – or by governmental action.

It is generally thought that the current popularity of genealogy grows out of the search for ancestors ripped away from families by American slavery, a trend inspired largely by Alex Haley’s hugely popular 1976 book, Roots. The history of slavery in all cultures and all periods is littered with governmentally approved forced family dismemberment. While PK might seem on the surface to be a smaller and less dangerous problem – in part because it seems to be caused by individuals acting unilaterally – close inspection will reveal that its destructiveness is indeed enormous and has influence that spreads beyond the circle of the principals involved. Parental Kidnapping affects child victims and left–behind adults in the same way that other forms of kidnapping do. It shatters identity, perpetuates fraud and plants the seeds for widening instability.

are aimed at freeing up public discussion rather than controlling the discussion. Thus the PAPERS do not provide at this early stage of research a comprehensive and systematic account. They are more in the line of a “first word” on the subject than a “last word.” The current state of the study of the history of the family demonstrates that the common approaches – jumping into interpretation, the formulation of theories, the composing of neat chronological accounts that claim to illustrate the line of a supposed social “evolution” (while excising any fact that fails to support the thesis) – are not conducive to the acquisition of a broad and unbiased foundation of factual knowledge. It is with this in mind that the PAPERS are designed to promote access to primary materials – of all kinds. Fictional representations give us just as much valuable insight into the era of their origin as sources that are intended to be received as do non–fictional.. Likewise, professional accounts can be burdened with just as many shortcomings (deriving from the author’s imagination) as popular accounts can. Thus all sources ought to be considered fair game and deserving of serious attention.

Perhaps the earliest fictional story of PK we have (which does not involve filicide as in the ancient Greek tragedy of Medea) is the cruel tale of Patient Griseldis, first published as the final story out of a hundred in Giovanni Boccaccio’s world–famous 14th century Decameron and adapted later by his friend Frances Petrarch in 1373. Scholars to this day debate the tale’s meaning.

Some light may be shed on how the story was understood in its day by looking at a surviving letter written by Petrarch describing the responses of his friends to their reading of his version of the Griseldis story.

“A Paduan friend of ours, a man of the highest intellect and broad knowledge, read it for the first time; scarcely past the middle … , he stopped, being overcome by sudden weeping; but after a while, when he took it in hand again and was about to read it through now that he had composed himself, a groan once more interrupted the reading as though it had made an appointment to come back then.

Another friend reads the tale without sobbing, but explains: ‘I too would have wept, for the touching subject and the words fit for the subject prompted weeping, nor am I hard–hearted; but I believed, and still do, that the whole thing was made up.’”

The Griseldis tale has been revived and revived across the centuries by writers, playwrights, opera composers and painters in dozens of retellings, each teller changing it to suit his or her needs. And in each era there was a ready audience fully appreciative of the horror of the forced separation of parent and child caused by the other parent related in the tale.

The stories you will read in are a sometimes of the “made up” sort and sometimes of the other. Yet all of them give us an important glimpse into the souls of those long gone. We will easily recognize our own humanity as we read of the experiences of these men, women, girls and boys. It is this sense of humanity that is our central concern.