House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans video screengrab / YouTube
CV NEWS FEED // An adult survivor of international child abduction shared her testimony at a congressional hearing led by Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ, as part of the 10th anniversary of the Sean and David Goldman International Child Abduction Act.
Smith is a prominent advocate for combating child slavery, kidnapping, and human trafficking.
The September 10 hearing took place in recognition of the Goldman Act’s decade-long effort to combat international child abduction. The bill, written by Smith in 2009, was passed into law in 2014, and allows the U.S. State Department to use diplomatic measures to address cases of international child abduction.
A September 10 press release shared the witness of Nafeesah Ali Ismail, who was taken by her father from her New Jersey home at the age of seven and brought to a small village in Northern Egypt. At the hearing, Ismail recounted the profound hardships she endured while growing up in a foreign land far from her family.
“I was a seven-year-old American in an Egyptian village surrounded by people who did not want to understand me,” she stated, adding, “people who saw and treated me as ‘less than’ simply because I did not have the same skin color and hair texture.”
According to the press release, Ismail shared that the experience left her feeling deeply alone and hopeless, which led to depression and multiple suicide attempts.
She shared that despite her mother’s appeals to bring her back, the U.S. State Department did not secure her return for many years.
Advocates, including Dr. Noelle Hunter from the iStand Survivor Network, helped Ismail return home three years ago, according to the press release.
“Now, I want to help rescue other abducted children and help them have the soft landing and long-term reunification support that they need when they come home,” Ismail stated.
Smith said that while the Goldman Act enables the State Department to employ various actions, such as a demarche, in order to help bring abducted American children back home, “the State Department consistently fails” to utilize these actions.
Earlier this year, Smith introduced new legislation to strengthen Goldman’s Act by demanding more data and greater transparency from the State Department, the press release reported. The proposed legislation also seeks to provide essential funding for research into the long-term psychological effects of international parental abduction.
“The heartbreaking reality is that hundreds of American children are still abducted every year—illegally kidnapped by one of their parents to a foreign land,” said Smith. “They are subjected to what amounts to a form of child abuse—with devastating psychological and even physical consequences for them and their families left behind.”
He later added, “We can and must do more to work to bring our abducted children home.”
