Girl Living with Mom Found Safe

but the entire world is frothing about it

Recently the case of fifteen year-old Kayla Unbehaun has been all over the news. I’m not sure why it’s managed to make such an international splash, given the sheer numbers of kids who go missing in the USA every year (460,000). It’s not like we were genuinely worried about her, were we? She wasn’t taken by some creepy old basement dude, she was with her mom. The news reports were overwhelmingly unequivocal on the narrative: Kayla was “abducted” by her “non-custodial mother”, Heather Unbehaun, over five years ago, and was found after a stranger recognized her after seeing a digitally enhanced age-progression image of her on Netflix’s ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ . Kayla was taken from her mother shortly after being recognized over a week ago in Asheville, North Carolina. She was placed immediately in foster care, and was then reunited with her father, Ryan Iskerka, whom she hasn’t seen since 2017. She was sent back to Illinois. The mother, meanwhile, is in jail and facing charges and extradition. She has no lawyer.

Hold on, just hold on a second.

What the fuck is going on here?

It’s hard to parse out, because all we’re given is a very uncontested version of events. Mom lost custody. Vengeful, unhinged, abusive Mom took daughter to spite Dad. Dad screams abduction. Daughter is found safe and well six years later. Mom is a horrible, evil criminal and should never see her daughter again. We are not told what the daughter thinks. It is clearly not very important in this version of events.

Personally, I’m not buying that this is a straightforward case at all. This article gives us a little more information. Apparently Kayla’s parents weren’t together. She was conceived after a one night stand (no judgment, guys, we’ve all been there. It’s just for context). Custody and visitation was not an issue for the first four years of her life - I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t dealt with in court. Both parents figured it out and all seemed OK, until Heather decided she wanted to move states, just in time for Kayla to enter kindergarten. Here’s Ryan Iskerka (Dad) in his own words. My annotations are in brackets.

"Heather decided she wanted to move to Athens, Georgia with Kayla when she was just four," Ryan told MEAWW in a conversation nearly six years after Kayla's disappearance. "I was fine with the move as long as we could agree and establish a visitation schedule and child support, and Heather agreed. But they suddenly moved a few weeks later without telling me. [Dude - you had a one night stand with this lady. You’d given her permission. You need an ankle tag on her? Fuck off] I found out about it when Kayla opened up to me on the phone. The day after I found out I filed to establish visitation rights and child support [Why? She’d clearly given you access up until that point and was involving you in Kayla’s life. Why did you need to go to court?]. I think Heather saw this as a declaration of war [listen, buddy. This was a declaration of war. It’s aggressive, it’s pugilistic, and it’s bullying] because when we went to court I was asking to see Kayla in Illinois over dates that would be school holidays, like we had discussed, but she was trying to make a case that I either should not see Kayla at all or should have to come down to Georgia to see her [So the issue is you didn’t want to hop on a plane? Are you surprised she didn’t want to accommodate you? You took her ass to court for custody after telling her it was OK to move!]. Child support was established, agreed upon and signed on the first day of court [really? how much for? who paid who? Tell us]. The problems establishing a final visitation schedule in court went on for years [this sounds familiar] with my relationship with Kayla being through Skype for a few hours twice a week and seeing her for a few hours around holidays if Heather was back in town," he added. [You know you could have taken the initiative and gone to visit her, dude? They have these things called planes, and cars]

I’m going to muddle through this mess, to point out two things that stand out to me. Dad was fine with the move, so Mom moved. Dad then changed his mine, got really angry, decided he wasn’t fine with the move, and went to court to drag Mom back and start the custody ball rolling.

Firstly, let’s look at the facts. Despite the popular narrative stating that mothers overwhelmingly gain custody of kids in contested custody situations (usually promoted by misogynistic Men’s Rights Lawyers like this one,) it’s simply not true. Most divorcing couples never make it in front of a Judge. 91% of warring couples settle, mediate, and come to an agreement outside court - and that agreement is, 51% of the time, an agreement between both parties that the mother takes primary custody of the kids. So when people say Judges and courts are ‘biased’ towards the mother, they’re talking about a very specific subset of divorcing couples who seek a trial, and those people are rare. Those people are in deep shit. There is something very wrong going on between those people, because court is expensive, court is scary, and court is mean. Most people who divorce never set foot in a court, and never see a judge because they are not stupid. Only 4% of ALL DIVORCING COUPLES go in front of a Judge, and ask for a trial. These motherfuckers are desperate.

In the early 1980’s, 84.3% of these ‘high conflict’ cases that made it to trial resulted in sole custody being awarded to the mother. By 1990 this had dropped to 58.1%. And today the United States pretty much overwhelmingly mandates fifty-fifty custody, no matter if there is a history of domestic violence, coercive control, abuse, neglect and other forms of violence or antisocial behavior as outlined in the ACE study. Experts point to the mandating of fifty-fifty custody as a dangerous and parent-centered model which divides a child like an asset, or a piece of property, and fails to take into account the fact that most contentious divorces end up in court because there is something very, very wrong and dark and twisted going on.

Going in front of a Judge is one of two things. It is either an act of desperation and a plea for protection, or it is an act of war, vengeance and control.

Ironically the people - primarily men - who use court as an act of war, vengeance and control, as a form of post-separation abuse, are usually the first people to accuse a protective mother of behaving like themselves. They’re the first people to claim the debunked theory of ‘alienation’.

I’m sifting through Ryan Iskerka’s words, and I can’t see any concern for the welfare of Kayla. There are no mentions of incidences where Kayla was put at risk by Heather apart from some nebulous mentions of healthcare. Instead, everything is filtered through one perspective: Ryan Iskerka’s. He agreed to a move, and then when he found out Heather expected him to do some traveling to visit his kid, he got pissed and went to court. He actively pursued custody of Kayla, a little girl who had never lived with him. And then he invoked that old chestnut: parental alienation.

“Heather and I had some difficulty communicating and agreed to use a special app to organize our interactions concerning Kayla. In doing so we were seeing proof that Heather was negatively influencing my relationship with Kayla and there were concerning issues around how she was handling Kayla's healthcare," Ryan said. "Eventually because of that and other things that came up that proved Heather was actively attempting to alienate Kayla from me and my family, the courts decided to force Heather to move back to Illinois with Kayla and then later to give me primary custody after further issues. It was never my goal to cause any of that to happen but what was happening had negative effects on Kayla, and my relationship with her. Kayla had been living with my wife, my two stepdaughters and me and things were going great for a few months until she was abducted," he added. 

Woah, woah there buddy. So you forced the mother of your child to give up her life in Georgia, after you specifically agreed she could move there? You dragged her ass back to Illinois, and then you went after primary custody because you didn’t want to make the effort to visit your daughter in the place where she lived? And you say it wasn’t your goal?

You don’t end up with primary custody ‘by mistake’. Whoops! That five year court battle really got out of hand there didn’t it? How the fuck did that happen? Come the fuck on.

Ryan Iskerka forced the mother of his child to live where he wanted her to live, and then took custody away from her by claiming she was alienating him from Kayla. Dear Ryan Iskerka: you sound like a complete prick. Kayla, it’s OK lady. We all share defective genes with dickwads. It is part of the sad truth about life. You are still golden, girl. Shine bright.

OK, let’s back up a little. Just as The Guardian and international news outlets published this article about Kayla, they also published this article about the rise of child killings by abusive fathers, facilitated by the increasing tendency of courts to favor join custody decisions or to remove children away from their ‘safe’ parent, and place them with an unsafe parent. Fathers, we are told, are responsible for 70% of child killings when parents split up. AT THE SAME TIME as these two articles came out, a young teen in Utah, Om Moses Gandhi, whose mother had been labeled an “alienator” by the court for flagging her concerns about Om’s abusive father in a similarly disputed custody case, was murdered. He was murdered - you guessed it - by his father. And then, at the same goddamn fucking time as alllllllll these articles were vomited out into the press, the UN came out with a report, by Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. This report confirmed the use of the term ‘parental alienation’ in family court is violating the governing standard of the best interest of the child. It stated clearly that ‘parental alienation’ has been used to punish women who report abuse. Judges have seen allegations of abuse as efforts by mothers to manipulate their children and separate them from their fathers out of spite. There is a pathologizing of protective mothers, and an inability by courts to sufficiently investigate domestic violence, particularly when it relates to child custody. There is an erroneous belief that men who are abusive to women are not going to be abusive towards their own children, that domestic violence is somehow in the past, irrelevant to the issue at hand. A mother who disagrees with this is termed an alienator, and her child is taken away from her and handed over to the abusive father. ‘Parental alienation’ is catastrophic to the safety of women and children. It is also, as the UN report points out, highly gendered.

This is a gendered issue. These issues disproportionately affect women and mothers. When courts mandate fifty-fifty custody to the most explosive, the most dangerous, the most volatile of men, and the most abused and victimized of women and children - they are holding a lit match to a dry bonfire.

I want to point out that I do not know the whole story behind Kayla and Heather’s situation. I could be completely wrong. Maybe the Mom is a horrible person. I write for a living, and that gives me a deep sense of empathy and storytelling, and I don’t think people, particularly mothers, do stuff like this unless they are truly in despair. I’m fascinated by the profile of this story, and its continued reporting without any examination. There is a benign and bland acceptance that a loving, caring mother can simply lose custody, lose the right to live where she wants, and lose the ability to protect her child, without question. There’s an uncomplicated acceptance that a mother becomes an abducter simply because a man says so. That is truly fucked up.

I know many, many women who have fled domestic violence situations, only to lose custody to abusive men who have successfully invoked parental alienation as a defense. I know many women who fled and lost custody because their fleeing was not recognized as an act of self preservation, survival and ultimately protection, but was criminalized and punished. And I do know, intimately, what post-separation abuse looks like, because I am living it every day. I am living in a city I don’t want to be in, 6,000 miles away from my work and a home I own surrounded by friends and family. I’ve had to abandon my contacts and my work in London, and start from scratch here. I’ve lost a decade of my life living this shit. There are many things I love about LA, but I am not here by choice (hint: you can help make my life easier by employing me on your TV show when this strike is over). I know how crushing, destructive and inhumane having your life controlled by a court and a vengeful ex can be. I see everyday the kind of psychological affects that has on a child, not to mention the knock on affects of poverty, insecurity, depression and anxiety. I am not the same person I used to be, and I never will be.

I do not know why Heather ran, but I suspect she ran for a very good reason. I suspect that no one is listening to Kayla, and asking her side of the story, and asking her what she thinks and feels and wants. She is fifteen. Like all children and young adults, her voice should be prioritized. Her mother should not be criminalized for protecting her child and for seeking freedom from coercive control and endless court battles with an angry and controlling man.

Until we start to publish these stories critically and with an eye for the way that they feed into these larger narratives of patriarchal abuse, violence and control against women and children, we are simply sustaining the broken system we are trying to fight against.