No, Papa!
by David Elvar
What do you do when you’re where you don’t want to be? What do you do when you’re with who you don’t want to be with? What do you do when the law fails you? Whatever it takes. You do whatever it takes…Elisa is fourteen years old. She has an English mother and a Sicilian father. She was born in England but raised in Sicily, and when her parents split up, she returns willingly to England with her mother. This is where the problems start.Unfortunately for her, her father has the law on his side, the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. And he uses it. The problem is, though, that she doesn’t feel abducted. And how can she have been abducted if her father had paid for her ticket to England in the first place? How can she have been abducted if he’d then sent money every month so she could stay there? You’d think it would be an open-and-shut case, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, the law thinks otherwise. And now she finds herself back in Sicily, back with him, back without her mother. This is her story. This is how she plays the hand an inflexible and unforgiving law has dealt her.