When Bob Shuman was 4 years old, his father picked him up from his mother's house in Pennsylvania for a weekend visit and drove straight to Los Angeles. For the next 20 years, Mr. Shuman had virtually no contact with his mother.
He spent his childhood in California with his father and a stepmother pained and confused about a mother he was not permitted to mention.
And he was never allowed to express anger about being abducted.
"It was portrayed to me that my real mother was not a nice person, that my father saved me from that environment and that I was a lucky person," says Mr. Shuman, now a counselor in the Employee Assistance Program for Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. "In those days, the idea was to keep your mouth shut and go on. It was a family secret, one of those things that you don't talk about.
"My stepmother was threatened by it, she wanted me to see her
as my real mother. So the family system was 'I needed to protect her feelings.' . . . It was not until I was an adult that I could begin to deal with this."
It has proved difficult for the 39-year-old counselor to understand his parents: A mother who gave birth to him when she was 15 and later struggled with drug and alcohol abuse; a father who had initially hoped his wife would follow him to the West Coast if he used his son as bait.
Parental abduction can be not only traumatic but also terribly complex, say Geoffrey Greif and Rebecca Hegar, associate professors at the University of Maryland School of Social Work at Baltimore, in their new book, "When Parents Kidnap: The Families Behind the Headlines" ($22.95, The Free Press).
The book marks the first attempt to document parental kidnapping from the point of view of social science rather than criminal justice. It considers the situations of the children, the searching parents and the abductors.
The authors believe civil and criminal definitions of parental abduction should become more uniform. They point out that in Texas interference with child custody is a third-degree felony that applies to a parent who takes, retains or entices a child younger than 18 away from a custodial parent in violation of a court order.
In Maryland, however, it is only a misdemeanor to abduct a child under the age of 12 from a custodial parent -- unless the child is taken out of state.
