They Are My Children, Too: A Mother's Struggle For Her Sons - Hardcover

Meyer, Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891620150 ISBN 13: 9781891620157

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 1999

Synopsis

The author recounts her unsuccessful attempts to get her German ex-husband to return her two sons whom he has kept in Germany in violation of their custody agreement

About this title

About the Author

Catherine Meyer has remarried and now lives in Washington, D.C. where her husband is the British Ambassador to the United States. She is still waging an active campaign in several countries to regain the right to be with her children-and is lobbying for enforceable laws against child abduction.

Reviews

Now the wife of Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the U.S., the author has attracted media attention to her four-year struggle to regain access to her two sons. The author contends that in 1994, her former husband, Hans-Peter Volkmann, a German doctor, violated a legal separation agreement by refusing to return nine-year-old Alexander and seven-year-old Constantin to their London home after they spent a six-week holiday with him in Germany. Meyer's account details the roadblocks she met in German courts often staffed by judges she felt were more sympathetic to the children's German father than to her, a British citizen of French and Russian extraction. Meyer was initially able to obtain court orders for the return of her children, but she claims that Volkmann hid the boys until a higher German court upheld his appeal on the grounds that it was in the children's best interests to remain in Germany. She also details the agreements Volkmann apparently made and broke for her court-ordered visits to her sons. According to Meyer, her ex-husband brainwashed their sons into thinking that their mother had abandoned them. Although the trauma Meyer has suffered as a parent is indisputably intense, her defensive descriptions of the early marital disagreements she had with Volkmann are unnecessary and do little to illuminate her tragic situation. In the end, though, the author makes a strong case for enforcement of the Hague Convention on Child Abduction, which prohibits kidnapping across frontiers.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two young boys abducted by their father, their mother unable to visit or telephone, the courts delaying custody or visitation decisions as years passit's a horror story. With divorce rates remaining high, tales such as this one grow more common. Separated from her husband, the author lived with her sons in England, their father in Germany. The two boys visited him regularly during school holidays, and Meyer gloried in the idea that her sons would be Euro-children, fluent in three languages (English, French, German) and comfortable on or off the Continent. In the summer of 1994, the boys headed for a scheduled vacation with their father and never returned. They live today in Germany with him and his extended family, who used the authority of local courts to override international agreements regarding abducted children. Why? The boys were discriminated against in England and taunted as ``Nazi,'' the relatives charged; they also claimed that while Meyer worked she left her sons in the care of strangers. She disproved all the accusations, but not to the satisfaction of Germany's courts, which give weight to children's preferences. Meyer's sons, although only nine and seven years old, ``expressed a strong desire'' to be GermanMeyer believes because they had been manipulated by their father and taught to hate her. When her German and English lawyers could do no more, she pursued her case in the British Parliament, the French Cabinet, and finally through the media in England and France, where a version of this book first appeared. She also joined international activist groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Now married to the British ambassador to the US, she is able to speak to her children by telephone occasionally but has not been allowed to visit. A somewhat hysterical tone weakens Meyers arguments, but overall this is an eye-opener regarding the international swamp that can turn Euro-parents into bureaucratic victims. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891620150
• ISBN 13: 9781891620157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352