Fearful that their son was becoming entangled in a gang and having failed to change his behavior, two London parents tricked him into traveling to Ghana, where they enrolled him in a strict boarding school and left him.
A judge ruled on Thursday that they were acting in his best interest.
The boy, now 14, took his case to a London High Court after his parents duped him into traveling in March of last year to the West African nation, their home country. The boy, however, was born in Britain, and argued to the court that he was worse off, educationally and socially, in Ghana.
“The decision falls within what I regard as the generous ambit of parental decision taking, in which the state has no dominion,” Justice Anthony Hayden said in his ruling.
While every teenager has challenged their parents, and perhaps even fantasized about dragging them to court, the case in the London High Court may reveal less about familial tensions than it does about the concerns some immigrant parents have for their children amid rising fears in Britain.
The boy’s father told the court that he did not want his son to be “yet another Black teenager stabbed to death in the streets of London.” (According to British law, the boy and his family may not be named.)
The judge, while criticizing the parents for using underhanded tactics, agreed that he was at greater risk in Britain than in Ghana.
“I recognize that this is, in many ways, both a sobering and rather depressing conclusion,” Judge Hayden said.
Although knife crime rates in England and Wales are lower than their recent peak in 2019, according to the most recent government data, they increased 4 percent in the 12 months before March 2024. And several high-profile cases of fatal stabbings have stoked fears.
Black children make up a disproportionate share of knife offenders, that data shows. But there is a misperception that Black children, especially boys, are more susceptible to gang violence, said Bruce Houlder, the founder of Fighting Knife Crime London, a nonprofit. London’s demographics, with a higher Black and immigrant population than the rest of Britain, had also contributed to this perception, he said, but data indicates that poverty is a larger indicator of violence than race.
“Immigrant communities are very often exemplars of good parenting,” Mr. Houlder said.
The ruling may also set a precedent for other parents who want to send children back to their home countries, though the court is likely to consider the stability and education system of each host country, said Amean Elgadhy, a lawyer specializing in family law at the firm representing the family.
Two years before the family decided to send him to Accra, Ghana’s capital, the boy, then 12, went from a conscientious and hardworking student to a headstrong adolescent who began to cut school and get into fights, according to the parents’ account in court records. His school also suspended him for two days.
His parents worried that his rebellion signaled a more dangerous turn: that he had been sucked into the orbit of a gang. He made friends with older boys and sported an expensive mobile phone and jacket that his parents did not buy, according to court documents. In one incident, his parents found a knife he had hidden in the garden, the documents said.
The boy’s school in London and a police officer registered concerns that a gang might have been grooming him, especially after an incident when his phone was hacked and another student posted his messages online, seemingly to provoke a rival group. Terrified, the boy refused to go to school, his father testified.
“No, Daddy, you don’t understand, these guys come with knives and guns to you after school to attack to ensure you are dead,” the father recalled his son saying.
The boy denied that he was in a gang. “He feels that his parents have depicted him as some sort of gangland criminal, which he strenuously objects to,” the boy’s lawyer, James Netto, said.
In Ghana, the boy was bullied, he told the court, and alleged that a security guard at the boarding school had manhandled him. (The school denied the assertion.)
After the family agreed to take him out of the school, the boy went to live with relatives and enrolled in online classes. He worries, he told the court, that he is falling behind his British schoolmates. The move to Ghana has also severed his relationship with his two elder sisters, his lawyer said, and left him isolated in a country he does not see as his own.
Deeply unhappy in Ghana, the boy first tried to get the British High Commission in Accra and child services in London to intervene. Eventually, a British nonprofit for vulnerable children, Children and Families Across Borders, connected him with Mr. Netto’s office, the lawyer said.
In an interview, Mr. Netto said the judge’s conclusion that the boy was safer in Ghana cast a wide and unfair light as “a pretty damning indictment of young Black men in London.”
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