David Goldman, whose Brazilian wife abducted their child to Brazil to start a new life with a lover in 2004, is finally set to regain custody of his son. Mr. Goldman has been battling the Brazilian court system for years to regain access to his own child. His ex-wife expired during childbirth last year, after which the boy, now 9 years old, was “adopted” by his wife’s adulterous lover without Mr. Goldman’s consent.
This is the kind of nightmare that fathers usually don’t dare to consider, and it underscores the dire need for family law reform. Allowing the removal of children from their home country without the father’s consent constitutes kidnapping, but in these days of widespread international travel it is a fairly frequent occurrence, and women get away with it all the time. Although it is almost never reported, the vast majority of international kidnapping cases each year are perpetrated by women. Sadly, they almost always get away with it, and fathers rarely see their children again. Some feminists, as might be expected, have been struggling to enshrine a woman’s right to abduct children.
Mr. Goldman is one of the lucky ones: he will be reunited with his son. Hundreds of thousands of men are not so fortunate, and must carry the pain of a lost child throughout their lives. It is a widespread injustice that cries out for drastic action, but far too many are reluctant to even address the issue.
In Goldman’s case, the most revealing thing so far is a letter written by his son’s maternal grandmother to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In the letter, she writes: “Our moral foundation values the mother’s role. In the absence of the mother, the raising should be done by the grandmother. That’s how it’s done in Brazil, from north to south, regardless of race, religion or social class. It’s natural that foreigners, with a different foundation, would not understand these authentically Brazilian feelings.”
I’m not sure whether this is actually the case – perhaps our Brazilian readers can verify her statement – but it is about the same thing one might expect from an American woman. In fact, I don’t think it is a matter of national tradition so much as it is a universal female sense of entitlement. Women instinctively feel that they own children, and that fathers have no real claim to their own progeny. This is the law of the jungle, and as firm a refutation of patriarchy and civilization as any opinion.
As we have stripped fathers of their place in the family, we have been deconstructing civilization, and sadly now we even have so-called “conservatives” who would lead us down this path to ruin. That a man has to fight for five years for the right to raise his own child speaks volumes about the state of our society. It is absolute proof that there is no patriarchy in the West, as patriarchy, first and foremost, is about the man’s legal and socially recognized stewardship of his own home and family. If that is trumped by his mother-in-law, there is no family as we know it, and we are already well on our way back to savagery.
