Ah, finally, a civil discourse! Hooray.
I can concede that if the only option(s) available to the court are jail-time (and fees, but we’ll set this part aside for now), then you make an excellent point that the court would have to condone an illegal act in order to not send the father to jail and thereby, in effect, punish the children.
However, take under consideration. There are a number of classifications of crime. Crimes against nature, against humanity, and so forth. Consequently, (and I am VERY pro-judicial reform), I would challenge that 1) This article is so vague that no one can draw ANY type of the conclusions people are trying to about what was or was not said to the children, or what circumstances under which custody was ultimately awarded, and 2) What the man did (That we KNOW of, qualifier) was not a crime against the children, but against the Court. “Kidnapping” in this case, is only defined by the court taking away the man’s legal right to rear his children, and violating a court order is just the redundancy that prosecutors have built into the system to try people for multiple crimes for one incident.
Despite whatever wicked or horrible things people fanatasize that may have gone on, we only know that this man took his own children and raised them, and probably did not paint their mother in a good light (”said bad things about her”). If the shoe was on the other foot, and this was a man awarded custody, and NO other information was available, people would be clamoring about how the mother had a good reaosn to take her children, but should have gone about it the other way. Not to mention, the fact that it comes from AP—and subsequent lack of journalism, on virtually any other topic, would be questioned more harshly.
This is a simple, and highly demonstrated principle of persuasion that is seen in social psychology. If you give very few facts in a story, people will fill in motives, personality traits, and characters, based on NOTHING. And this is what is going on here. Maybe I’m guilty too (but only inasmuch as was—hypothetically—incorrectly reported), but the liars on this thread continue to put words in my mouth, because of a continued fundamental attribution error on all accounts.
You mistook my argument somewhat. My point is that these children had their mother ripped away from them - to their own detriment and to hers, according to the court judgment 15 years ago and according to scientific evidence provided she was not abusive - in an illegal act. You have posited that she should not be allowed custody because the daughter doesn’t wish it.
The crime against the mother and the children was severing their relationship involuntarily. This is NOT just a “crime against the court”.
I did not speak to punishment.