THE LOST GIRL AND THE CARING FATHER

ANYONE with a shred of compassion must this week have felt for Perry Jewell
the father accused of kidnapping his daughter Samantha in a last-resort
attempt to break her from drug dependency by imposing a detoxification
program on her.

King Lear never had such an ungrateful child. The response of the - we
choose our word - recalcitrant Samantha Jewell was to spit at this parental
help, to break the kindly restraints and then to shout her sad defiance and
claim her adult independence. Since she is 19 she has that legal right. She
is technically an adult, though those experienced with wide and chronic
drug abuse will know that she has already missed so much of life she is
probably only physically a teenager.

We cannot here say the law is an ass. There must be a cut-off point between
childhood and adulthood, and since Ms Jewell formally falls well over the
generally sanctioned divide she has the right to make a misery of her life
and a tragedy of her fathers. She is a fool. On all the evidence, she is
also an uncaring fool. She is also a paradigm for the hard-drug agony which
torments thousands of Australian families this day.

Samantha Jewell's penalty, one which will, or certainly should, haunt her
to the end of however many days of lucidity she has left, is the knowledge
that her behavior was despicable. That it was teenage rebelliousness and
drug-sodden does not make it any less despicable.

Her father is her victim and the victim of the laws which so angered him.
But in his despair he is entitled to the knowledge that many of us see him
as a good and caring parent driven to, and past, despair. There are too
many such parents in Australia today.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski