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.
