Our English language has a very specific word we use to describe the crime committed when someone abducts a child from the child’s home or family. We call that kidnapping. And when a child is kidnapped, we marshal all of our resources — official, as in the police, and informal, as in family and friends and neighbors and even strangers — to capture the abductor and return the child safely and quickly to his/her family.
When we describe what we have been doing as a nation in forcibly removing children from a mother or father, and taking them away beyond the reach of the parent, we have been using the wrong word.
We need to call it what it is — we have been kidnapping.
Joan P. Ogden, Salt Lake City
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