Topic : 11/26 Katherine Returns

Some of you guys are making this message board into a religion war.  Unbelievable!  What about Katherine???

I agree that her parents need to hold some sort of responsibility in this whole mess, but she is 18 now.  Hello, she is an adult.  She can do as she chooses now.  All her parents can do at this point is be supportive or Katherine can "write" them off.  (Either you accept me for who I am or I'm gone routine.)  There's nothing her parents can do about it now.

Why was her computer time not being monitored way back before this mess even got started??  I have a computer that accesses the internet, but I also have parental controls set up on it.  Plus, it's in a room that isn't private.  When the children are on the computer, I am, in a sense, monitoring everything they do.  There is NO myspace, no chat rooms, no chatting at all with anybody even if you don't have to type it in!!!  It is up to the parents to protect their children!!!  Not the other way around.

My oldest is almost 13.  She has been begging for a myspace for almost a year.  "All of her friends have one!"  The answer is always no.  Parental controls will not even allow her to access myspace.  I'm not stupid enough to believe that she isn't on there when she is over at a friend's house, but I do believe that she has the fear not to create her own account.  I understand the frustration of stating the reasons why she can't have one over and over, but that's the way it is.  She always comes back with the same reply, "I can make it private and I will only accept people as my friends that I know."  Yes, we all know how that works.  (Not going to happen.)  All of her 12 and 13 year old friends have their profiles set to say that they are 17.  That way, they don't have to have their profiles private!!!  (Obviously their parents aren't watching what's taking place!)  Look up the story of the girl that just committed suicide near St. Louis, MO all over a comment left on her myspace!!!!! 

The cell phone, c'mon lady!!!  These kids with cell phones that have free run with them drives me nuts!  It's just like a computer!  Watch what is going on with it!  Yes, we have one for the kids, but it is a Firefly!!!  WE program what numbers can be called and only allow it to accept calls from those numbers!  If you don't want to go that route, go to disney mobile.  You can do the same things with their phones and you can also track them on your computer because the phone has a GPS.  Some people don't want to pay the money...  What is your child's safety worth???  Our kids do not appreciate it, but they know that's how it is.  And yes, we hear all the time about all my friends have their own cell phones, they text, they take pictures.......... on and on and on.  Guess what?  We care more about their safety versus them looking cool. 

Let this be a warning to all parents, you have to stay on top of your kids.  Yes, you can trust them to a certain degree, but not with full reign.  They are not mentally mature enough to make adult decisions, so don't let them.  Do I think that my kids are going to turn out wonderful?  No, but I am doing everything in my power to protect them from something like this!  We talk and we talk a lot.  They know the reasons behind everything that we do and they know the punishment they will face if they break the rules.  That's how we run things in this house.

As far as Katherine, I truly hope that Dr. Phil can help.  What's happened has happened and she can only move on from here.  I hope that she makes the right choice because she has not matured mentally and we all know that it's easier to brainwash a child.  Good luck and I hope that she doesn't have any resentment against her parents for "allowing" this relationship to continue and "allowing" her to get into this mess.  No, they didn't "allow" it, but they didn't do anything to stop it either.

Hello, My name is Elizabth, im Australian 3 years ago i met my husband on the internet in yahoo chat we only chatted a few months and i decidded to see him , so i travelled to his country in Plestine i met his family and we married after 2 weeks , i stayed in Palestine for 4 months untill my husband got his visa, i really liked Palestine they have respect for tourist and everyone, its not true how people say bad things about Palestine, yes there is war there but your safty there form God. when to Palestine no one from my family knew i was travelling there and my family didnt know i was there, my family didnt want to accept him , because his an arab, but now they respect him and love him, we have to beautiful children together and we live  in Australia , we have our own business we love each other very much and are very happy his has his australia citizan, we go to Palestine almost every year to vist my husbands family and they saw our baby boys, Katherine if you really love Abdullah and he loves you nothing can stand in your way , dont let your family affect your decission, you both can have a beautiful life together , coz i did it u can too, i wish you both all the best and take care, liz

So I soppose when he bit her and kicked her ...that was all in the name of love? 

and when he called her trash names like slut and bitch....those were terms of endearment?

What a beautiful country THAT IS!?!?!

I am so glad I live in America and don't have to get that kind of "love" from men in any of the countries with those kind of values and customs.

God Bless America.

Do you think teenage pride = hard-headedness or stubbornness? I found Katherine to be, especially on the first two shows, to be awfully hard-headed.

People are often described as having too much pride to concede that they're wrong. But I consider it a different kind of pride than the self esteem that keeps girls and women from falling for the abusive "bad quy" types. I've seen some really conceited girls who almost worship their abusive boyfriends. Because conceit often doesn't = self esteem.

Do you think Katherine could be lacking in self esteem?

When Katherine was returned at the age of 16, why didn't her mother take the cell phone, cancel the internet access, and change the home phone number? Allowing her daughter to continuously call and receive calls and text messages from Abdullah showed to me who really runs the house and sets the rules. So what if Katherine would have screamed, cried, and threatened to run away again. That's what kids do when they're too immature to deal with serious issues competently.

Why didn't her mother try to negotiate with Abdullah - asking him to prove to her, her daughter and the family that he was an honorable man by coming to America, getting to know them, proving to her that her daughter would be safe to go with him. It wouldn't have taken Katherine long to ditch the guy if she could have been shown that she wasn't worth the effort to him that it would have taken him to do this. She lowered herself by chasing after HIM, when HE should have been chasing after HER - Katherine should have asked him to prove he was willing to court her. If he had truly loved her, he would have come to her and her family to court her properly. I seriously doubt that any families in his country would have allowed THEIR daughters to chase after Abdullah like that. Maybe there aren't too many families in his country that would have even allowed Adbullah near their daughters, and that may be why he had to hunt for an American girl off of MySpace.

The mother also could have found some counseling for her daughter that should have involved teaching her about the realities of living as a female in a male-dominated Muslim world.

It still boils down to common sense and not being afraid to be the parent. So what if my kids didn't like me much while they were growing up? I have friends, I didn't have to give birth in order to get friends. Growing up, my sons couldn't access anything on the computer except their games as it was locked to internet access. And the computer was in the living room right next to couch where I sat. And even in the 80's the chat rooms were scary places for children. They were only allowed on the Internet when I could be there to moniter what they were doing, and they were only allowed an hour of computer internet time daily between all three of them. Plus, their homework and chores had to be done first. The first child who finished their chores got on the computer first. They moaned and groaned and complained the whole time - years, acutally. But, my oldest son, when he turned 19, gave me the greatest compliment ever - "Mom, I'm glad you raised us the way you did. Everything you told us really is the way the world really is and you protected us until we were old enough to handle the real world."

I have read the replies from people in Canada & Australia and I have to tell you they make more sense then our Government here in the United States. I'm a Ex Captain in the 173d Army Airborne Rangers and I can't believe that I fought and we still have Service men/women fighting and dying, so that our Government can aloow people like this to come and go to our Country anytime they feel like it. This is Totally Wrong.... Lets' Learn form our friends from Canada, Australia, etc..... His whole family should never never never get another VISA form our Government!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you find the time to live also? Anyway good for you but some kids are more challenging than other even within the same family unit. I have 3 kids (20, 19 and 16) and I went through almost the exact problem Katerine's family has with my 19 year old. At the time she was almost 18 and was living with me in the UAE where I am on temporary assignment.

My daughter started a secret relationship with a 25 year-old Iraqui she met at the gym. downstairs For months, we were unaware of what was going on - and no I am not an absentee mother. For months he brought her back and again to the American Embassy to apply for a fiance's visa (which is not an easy thing to obtain, without success, and still without our knowledge. He insisted that their relationship remains secret. She may have found this exciting but she was also always a rebelious child so doing things in our back was typically her style.

Now, here in the UAE, a relationship with someone your are not married to is always illegal, punishable by 3 months of jail,90 lashes followed by deportation. Whatever your nationality. Whatever your age. We made sure our children knew the rules right from the start so she was informed.That being said, when we discovered what was going on, we forbid our daughter to see him again, we forbid him to approach her again and he became aggressive, verbally abusive to us and to my daughter who he still "loved "like a a mad man - boy , this visa. was slipping from his hands, he could almost touch it...

Well all this culminated to the evening I found a stash of cash and an "escape bag" that my daughter had prepared. We learned through her tears that we were destroying her life, that she had married him, that she had converted to islam and that she was pregnant. And that he was bringing her to Saudi Arabia. I almost had a hearth attack. She was on a plane to the US 1 hour later and we visited the police station right after the plane took off to file an official complaint against the guy as dishonoured parents. He was called in, and since he was illagally staying in the UAE, was forced to moved out of the country and is now in Syria. I revoked my daughter's visa and had her banned form the UAE for life so she could not come back. I tought, OK, problem solved.

Oh, we found out that the marriage was a muta marriage, so useless and illegal, that no paper was ever produced even to my daughter, and that her conversion was bogus... He just used her....and she fell for all of it, sadly.

The story only gets more interesting. Back to the US, she kept in touch with him, ramping up telephone bills of $1200. By this time we had cracked her and his email accounts so we were aware of what they were planning. He put her in touch with his uncle living in Canada so he could make her come to Toronto. The family was convinced that she was going to have his baby, that was all they could focus on. We called the uncle and threatened him with calling the guy's mother in Bagdad - which would have brought dishonor upon the whole family and give so much grief to his mother - if he kept trying to get my daughter out of the US. This worked and the uncle disappeared.

For a while the guy tryied to get my daughter to bring charges of physical abuse to the police in DC against me. Anything to get us out of the way of this visa that was now really becoming out of reach. It finally ended when she met, 5 weeks later another guy and fell head over head for him wrote back to the Iraqui that she had to take care of her man, not to contact her anymore. He called her all sorts of names and we never heard about him again. Oh and she was never pregnant.

She is now living with her "new man", has a 5 1/2 month baby, a GED. That is the life she has chosen. She is 19, I cannot tell her how to live her life. I would have prefer to have the perfect daughter but I don't. I did the last thing that was in my power to save her from being brought to Saudi Arabia by someone who only wanted to abuse her. To this day, she still blames me that I kicked her out of the house. Hell yes, I did. Better by me than by the authorities who would have sent her home after 90 lashes and time in jail. Better this than disappearing somewhere in Saudi Arabia (oh and they had plans to bring the baby to Bagdad...hello Bagdad...). At least she is safe. She will probably never realize what she got saved from but at this point I don't care. At least she is safe.

By the way, my two other kids are doing just fine. I diverted a lot of the attention I should have been giving them to my middle one. This was very unfair for them. Now things are back to normal and they have my undivided attention!