We live in the world’s first “Parental Kidnapping society,” a world where children and parents are torn from each other every day, where an enormous multi-billion dollar industry has been built up to engineer and profit from family dismemberment. Our present educational system and popular culture not only encourages people – from their earliest ages – to think of themselves as so many individualistic nodes of “wants” and “needs” and “rights” that it is inevitable that family dismemberment is so widespread. While there are occasional, not very robust, protests against the trend that attempt to promote “Family Values,” such cavils fall on deaf ears when the audience has been deeply programmed with what is rightly called “Broken Family Values.”

America largely can be credited with inventing and perfecting this particular form of family destruction that goes by the name of “Parental Kidnapping,” “Family Abduction,” “Custodial Interference” and an endless list of others. By the time of America’s revolution, PK had already become a widely known phenomenon. It has grown, by leaps and bounds in the intervening two centuries-plus. And the PK phenomenon has, we might say, been “exported.” While it certainly existed in other countries, it has never been as fashionable a custom as it has been in the US. Yet by the late twentieth century, as American culture came to dominate the globe, the custom of PK was taken up in other nations, becoming particularly common in England and the British Commonwealth as well as in Europe.

Photojournalists have even settled on a formulaic iconography to represent the feeling of loss experienced by the left-behind parent: a snapshot of the sad present framing the more innocent photographic image of an irretrievable physical union that has evaporated into traces of memory – kept alive through a searching hope.

Anti-PK organizations, organizations devoted to counter-abducting, missing child organizations, special therapies devoted to recovering from the effects of PK. There are lavish conferences of experts from all over the world who get together to try to hash out the complications of international law. There is even an organization of adults who had, as children, been abducted by a family member. It is called Take Root (takeroot.org).

By now, PK has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is a ubiquitous presence in the arts and entertainment. Indeed, PK stories are so common that we can expect popular representation in one form or another (movie, novel, TV series episode, autobiography, comic book, etc.) to appear every 4 to 5 days on the average – and this is not even including TV news magazines, talk shows and documentaries. PK is a common theme in the teen culture modes of amateur online fiction and Role Player Games (RPGs); there is even one RPG based specifically on PK and counter-PK, called “Repo Men.”

There are now so many movies dealing with parental kidnapping in existence it would be possible to organize a sizable international film festival devoted exclusively to the subject.

It is when we look at the huge selection of books written for children that deal with PK that it dawns on us just how far the chaos of family dismemberment has reached.

2001 was a peak year for this genre of children’s literature in the US, with nine titles that dealt with children being kidnapped by a family member, usually a parent. The 1989 children’s book was a non-fiction title, Kidnapped! Could It Happen To You, bears a title that hides the fact that the intended reader is being warned not about kidnapping in general – but rather about the possibility that the young reader’s parents might sometime separate, with either mom or dad deciding unilaterally to cut off the child from the other parent.

There are now close to a hundred books for children that touch on the subject. The best of them are well-written and nuanced unlike that vast majority of the novels for adult readers.

There are now close to a hundred books for children that touch on the subject. The best of them are well-written and nuanced unlike that vast majority of the novels for adult readers. In one story featuring The Incredible Hulk, the superhero succeeds in comprehending the ambiguities of the issue that the objective observer – such as a child trapped by greedy law system and a culture of egotism – will appreciate but that the average adult goes out of his way not to see.

Family dismemberment always involves self-centeredness on the part of an adult, but like any kind of antisocial behavior, it effects entire communities – including all the children who are left behind when a friend disappears into parentally imposed exile.

Many of the kids who have been parentally kidnapped grow up unaware of their own history and identity, believing their missing parent deliberately deserted or died – only to be rudely awakened to the truth by happenstance.

* THIS TEXT IS IN PROGRESS *