Stolen Child

"My name is Marie-Claire. I have had nightmares every night from the time I was 11, when I was kidnapped.” From the clutches of a French family who tortured her into the grips of an Algerian family who kidnapped and confined her, Marie-Claire went through hell before making a spectacular escape and reaching France. There are lives whose reality is hard to imagine. Marie-Claire's life is one of those. An unwanted child, born in France, beaten, involved in drug trafficking, she was abandoned, temporarily placed in the care of Social Services, before being returned to her parents—and then she was kidnapped by her stepfather and then by her father’s family that included a radicalized Islamic "tutor." She went through hell for ten years before escaping and starting on a path to recovery in which suffering and hardships kept getting worse, but which eventually led her to the hallowed halls of a French university, from where she continues to fight for the hundreds of children kidnapped by a parent—children who, every year, are victims of their parents' crimes and of institutional abandonment. She also uses her personal experience to look at mixed marriages, parental authority, parental responsibility. She points out with intelligence and accuracy the blind spots in the law, the cowardice of institutions, and the indifference of public opinion in the face of crimes whose victims are, first and foremost, thousands of children. The life of Marie-Claire is not a novel.