Why would you steal a child?

I am not talking about custody battles here. The reasons for taking away children in those circumstances are, sadly, all too clear. I don't know anyone involved in one of those situations who has felt that the outcome has been entirely satisfactory - not even when they have managed to get what they demanded.

No, this is about stealing a child who is in no way related to you.  Here in Downunder we have just had such a case with an unbelievable positive outcome. The child was found alive and well after eighteen days. It took a massive effort by many people. The full story is  something we may never know. I rather hope we don't ever find out because the child should be given every opportunity to simply return to her family and move on with her life. 

Unfortunately she will need to be interviewed. The police will need to try and discover what happened to her while she was locked away in a house by a man who has to be mentally ill. No sane person would try to do what he did. At four years of age she is considered competent to tell the police a great deal.

And yes, handled the right way a four year old will have the capacity to remember and tell a great deal. It won't be easy and it will require considerable skill to get accurate information from her.

I have been thinking of all this ever since she went missing. Any child who goes missing in that way reminds me of the man I once met. He was a the head of a small school in another country. He was taking a year away from teaching for two reasons. The second reason was to do a piece of research which is why he was at the same university. The first however was far more important. He needed "time out". 

The previous year he had gone to visit his mother. He usually spoke to her by phone a couple of times a week. She was not answering the phone and he was worried so, it being the weekend, he made the journey rather than worry the neighbour he could have called on. He found his mother sitting in her armchair. There was a cold cup of tea by her side. She had been dead for at least a day when he found her. That was a shock enough. What followed was worse.

There had to be an autopsy and in the course of that autopsy it was discovered that this woman had never had a child. That this woman was not his mother, could not have been his mother, left him shattered. There had never been the slightest hint that he was anything other than her biological son. 

There was nothing in any of the documents in the house to even acknowledge the state of affairs. Her will referred to him by name. There was nothing in it that acknowledged him as her son. His birth certificate was the next thing he checked. It turned out to be that of an infant who had died when less than a year old. The family was in no way related to him.

The emotional trauma this man was going through will stay with me for ever. He sat there and told the seminar group this story in an apparently calm manner but, at the end of it, his voice broke. He was so close to tears that I imagine everyone in the room felt uncomfortable.

"I don't know who I am," this man told us, "I am still trying to find out."

How could anyone deliberately do that?