If the fathers of Haydn Gomez and Gunnar and Kianna Berg haven’t gotten together for a beer yet, maybe they ought to. The two men have a lot in common. Both are Americans who married East Asian women and had adorable little kids by them, only to see their wives snatch the kids to their respective countries and refuse to give them back. And they live in the same town too: Fairfax, Virginia.
Alas, international child abduction can become a problem if an international marriage breaks up, as evidenced by another case I posted today, where the victim is thought to be in Zambia. International family abductions are even worse than the domestic kind, because finding the kid is almost never the end of the story. The two countries involved rarely agree as to what’s to be done with the child. Usually each nation will side with whichever parent is their citizen, which solves nothing, and so the custody issue is unresolved and the child usually stays with the abductor or at least in the abductor’s country, for years. I can’t think of a way to prevent this from happening. I mean, nobody marries thinking they’re going to get divorced, and no prenuptial agreement can prevent a selfish and/or vengeful parent from packing up the kid and heading off to the motherland, never to return.
I do hope Mr. Berg and Mr. Gomez will have their children returned to them, but I have to say the chances don’t look good for either of them. Japan in particular has a terrible record for returning abducted kids to the US. I’m not sure it has EVER done so.
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