Professor Diane Marie Amann recently presented her research on “Child-Taking” during a Forced Separation Workshop at King’s College London, which cosponsored the event along with Queen’s University Belfast School of Law and the UK Gender, Justice and Security Hub.

Organizers of the workshop – Professor Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Dr. Rebekka Friedman, and Dr. Diana Florez – brought together a global array of participants who engaged in a multidisciplinary exploration of instances and consequences of separating families. Studied were contemporary and historical contexts across the globe. They included: armed conflict and similar violence; security, carceral, and migration detention; coerced schooling; enslavement; and illegal adoptions.

Amann’s talk drew from her article, “Child-Taking,” soon to be published in the Michigan Journal of International Law. (Preprint draft available at SSRN.) As Amann theorizes it, child-taking occurs when a state or similarly powerful entity abducts children from their community and then endeavors to remake the children in its own image. This conduct, involving children taken from Ukraine, lies at the heart of the International Criminal Court warrants pending against President Vladimir Putin and another top Russian official. The article also examines other examples of the phenomenon, including the Nazis’ kidnappings of non-German children during World War II and the forced placement of Indigenous children into boarding schools in North America, Australia, and elsewhere.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. She writes and teaches in areas including child and human rights, constitutional law, transnational and international criminal law, and global legal history.