Mom Forced To Call Police To Get Her Son Back After Her Ex & His Mother Enrolled Him In School While He Was Visiting Them For The Summer
There's a name for this sort of thing — family abduction, and it is in fact a crime.
victorass88 | Getty Images | Canva Pro A mom on TikTok shared the harrowing turn her son's visit with his dad took over the summer and the lengths she had to go to in order to get him back and establish boundaries with her ex and his family.
Her story highlights a problem called family abduction that experts say is far more pervasive among single and divorced parents than most people realize.
The mom's ex and his mother enrolled their son in school hours away from his home during a summer visit.
Cece, a mom and TikToker known as @yellabonequeen23 on the app, summed her situation up as a case of "dead beat dads with the unhinged grandma" in a video about what went down in her family this summer. Sadly, the reality is far more complicated than that.
In a TikTok video, she shared the moment the police arrived at her ex's mother's house to retrieve her son after she'd let him "go for summer vacation with his dad, and the grandma said she enrolled [him] in school already," hours away from where she and her little boy live.
The mom said this is not the first time her ex and his mother have tried to take her son.
In follow-up posts, Cece shared more details of what happened with her son. "This is the second time they have tried to keep my son from me," she wrote in one. Many criticized her for letting her son go with his dad under those circumstances, but she commented that she "didn’t think it would happen again after him having a warrant out the first time."
Unfortunately, her giving the benefit of the doubt was taken advantage of, despite her ex not even being on their son's birth certificate and hence having not only no legal rights over the boy but certainly none of the documentation required to enroll him in school.
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In another post, she shared that given the length of the visit, her ex and his mother had "more than enough time to go to the courts and file for custody" rather than essentially kidnapping the child.
After confronting the grandmother on the phone, Cece found out that they thought they'd get away with it since Cece didn't even know the grandma's address. But this is 2024, and Cece quickly found it and put a stop to things.
"I found her address and took a 1 hour and 30 minute ride and pulled up on [them]," she wrote in another post. "I know they were surprised to see me at the front door."
She also revealed that in addition to not being on the birth certificate, her ex does not pay child support and doesn't even have visitation rights, let alone custody. She granted the visit out of the goodness of her heart.
Incidents like this are known as 'family abduction,' a staggeringly common crime that is sometimes a felony.
Cece's ex's egregious taking advantage of her goodwill is likely to land him in jail if Cece chooses to press charges. Cases like this, especially when the father isn't even on the birth certificate, are considered a form of kidnapping called family abduction, which is a felony in some jurisdictions.
Family abductions comprise a staggering proportion of child abductions. Citing Department of Justice statistics, Child Watch reports that during a single year, 203,900 cases were family or parental abductions, while 58,200 were non-family abductions and just 115 were "stereotypical" kidnappings — those in which children were abducted by strangers and held for ransom, for example, or came to other horrifying ends.
That disparity is particularly shocking given the hysteria over child trafficking that has erupted in recent years and which has formed the bedrock of highly politicized conspiracy theories like QAnon.
In nearly all cases, parental or family abduction is a crime punishable by fines and/or jail time in all 50 states. If the abductor takes the child outside the country, it then also becomes a federal crime under the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act.
But ultimately, the criminal nature is not what matters most — the incredible damage that is done to a child when someone he or she should be able to trust steals them away from the home and parent they know is abominable.
There are better ways to go about gaining custody, and if you have to rely on crime to do it instead, perhaps there's a reason you don't have custody in the first place.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.