samkorn's blog

Re: "B.C. Woman Arrested for 18 Year-old Ontario Child Abduction Case"; The Gazette: Dec.2, 2011




Congratulations are NOT in order for Canadian Police who, only after receiving a tip from the Missing Children's Society of Canada, were finally able to arrest Patricia O'Byrne on Vancouver Island for having kidnapped her baby daughter from Toronto in 1993.

That O'Byrne was able to hide in plain sight for 18 years, while she worked for the government under an assumed identity and selfishly raised the child without it's father, suggests that Canadian law enforcement doesn't take parental kidnappings committed by mothers very seriously. Hardly any time, therefore, is spent by Canadian cops investigating such cases.

Also at fault for such family ordeals, which almost always leave an indelible mark on the kidnapped children not to mention other family members, is the apparent inability of the Canadian justice system to come down hard on kidnapping mothers. While sentencing fathers to some serious jail time if convicted of such a crime, Canadian crown prosecutors and criminal court judges rarely apply the same criteria to women, and almost always let offending mothers off with only the proverbial slap on the wrist.

Only when women are finally treated EQUALLY to men by our revered justice system and given similar prison sentences, will deterrence be established and this awful crime be nipped in the bud. Perhaps Ontario justice officials now handling this case in Toronto should take a long, hard look at Canadian legal jurisprudence established in Quebec in 2001, when a Montreal man was sentenced to a 6-year jail term for having kidnapped his son for 17 years.

Canadian women have always clamored for equality with men in all walks of life; let's finally give them a taste of equal justice for heaven's sake!