JOANNA Fisher was six years old when she was kidnapped by her mother and taken from Australia to Amsterdam.
Joanna Fisher says she struggles to trust anyone after being abducted by her mother.
“I felt like we had to flee, we had to hide from my dad,” she says. “She pretty much brainwashed me from an early age.”
Gradually, Joanna realised her mother had lied to her about her father, a painful experience for a child who trusted her parents implicitly. After a legal battle and a spell in foster care, she was returned to her dad in Australia, but she says she still struggles to trust people and form relationships.
“I’m always thinking people could potentially have an ulterior motive, so I’m always very, very hesitant about trusting people and letting them in,” she said. “You don’t know how they could use it against you.”
Joanna was one of the 400 children who are abducted by a parent or family member every year in Australia, and appears in documentary Bringing Them Home at 8.30pm on 101 East tomorrow on Al Jazeera English.
Australia has the highest rate per capita of international parental abductions in the world, averaging two a week. That’s in part because parental abduction is not a crime in this country, unlike in the US and UK. While it’s an offence to remove a child from Australia without the permission of the court or the other parent, it’s not a criminal offence if there are no court proceedings or orders preventing it.
It means parents whose children have been taken overseas have little legal power to retrieve them, and there are many stories of bereft mothers and fathers unable to see or contact their children, including Patricia Nunez, who hasn’t seen her two sons since they were kidnapped and taken to Taiwan by their father a year and a half ago.
In 2010, Kennedy Kembo took the train home from his job at the Department of Transport in Melbourne to find his wife Karina was not waiting to drive him home from the station as usual. When he found she and his daughter Kayla weren’t there, he was horrified.
He spent weeks filing missing persons reports and contacting friends and family to try to track them down, until a month later, he received an email from his wife, with photos of their daughter. She wrote that she needed time to think and had gone back to her home country of Indonesia.
Over the next five years, Kennedy sent endless emails asking to see his daughter, as well as money for her maintenance. He received more photos in return, and was able to speak to her over Skype three times. His wife divorced him from overseas, and he was left with just a few pieces of clothing to remember his daughter, and a handful of possessions, including a handprint painting he treasured.
“When I look at it I see her hand reaching out to me, and when I touch it, it’s like I’m reaching out to her,” he told the documentary-makers.
Longing to see his only child, Kennedy spent $50,000 on his quest to find her. His last attempt was paying notorious “child recovery specialist” Colin Chapman to find her. After months of surveillance, there was a lead, and Kennedy and the filmmakers headed to Jakarta to look for his family.
Chapman’s espionage techniques led them to Kayla, capturing footage of her at her primary school. But there were grave concerns among the filmmakers about what many see as the private investigator’s vigilante techniques, and it started to look as though Chapman wouldn’t be able to simply whisk the little girl away under the eyes of the authorities.
“My personal struggle was how potentially traumatic this could be for Kayla,” director Steve Chao told news.com.au
“The fact that a father she hadn’t seen in five years would try to get her back, the idea of stealing her back. When things started falling apart it was a struggle seeing Kennedy.”
In a last-ditch effort to help the desperate father, the film crew went to Karina’s home with her family and banged on the door. They showed her a court order giving Kennedy custody in Australia, and she agreed he could come in and see Kayla.
After an hour together, she finally consented to allowing him access to his little girl. In heartbreaking scenes, Kennedy shows the filmmakers photos of his delighted
daughter posing with her daddy.
While there are still question marks over why Carina vanished, this family’s story may have a happy ending. Other parents in Australia face never seeing the children who mean everything to them again.
“Having a child cut out of your life is so difficult,” says Chao. “This is time you don’t get back. Kennedy struggled with the court system and depression. He became a loner, his friends didn’t understand why he couldn’t move on. It’s the same for Patricia Nunez.”
The people most at risk of suffering are the young children whose brains are still developing. Perhaps surprisingly, many of them don’t want to see stricter laws against parental abduction brought in.
“It’s so dangerous to punish the parents who are taking these kids away,” said Joanna. “It’s difficult enough to get over this, but to try to do it knowing you’re parents are in jail, it’s very tough.”
Instead, some have suggested the government should provide more concrete assistance in reuniting devastated families.
Separation from a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a parent, and the emotional toll on those left behind is heartbreaking. But it’s the children who most need our protection.
See full story on news.com.au
