Before the Internet, newspapers were read one day and used to wrap fish the next. News in print quickly faded into obscurity. Now that the majority of news operations have online versions, it’s much easier to search through archived stories. That can be great when the news is good. But when the headlines are unflattering, they never really disappear.
In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia began a higher education scholarship program under which thousands of young men were sent to study at universities overseas. In the 1990s, the numbers of Saudis studying outside the Kingdom fell, but in recent years, with the government offering tens of thousands of scholarships, those numbers have increased once more.
Studying abroad has many acknowledged benefits, which can be a boon to the Kingdom when Saudi students return home. However, there will certainly be some unintended consequences of sending so many students into a variety of cultures. Despite every effort to discourage students from marrying non-Saudis, some will do so, and families will be formed.
This was the situation in the past when Saudis studied abroad. In the long term, a significant percentage of these mixed marriages ended in divorce, often with children caught in the middle. On some occasions, amicable agreements could not be reached concerning the living arrangements of the children and ugly custody disputes arose. Several of these became widely publicized and what were private matters then became diplomatic issues. On the Internet there are tens of thousands of citations, mainly negative, involving child custody and Saudi Arabia. Those reports are never going away.
Back in 2002 and 2003, this issue attracted an extreme amount of attention internationally, which did nothing to improve the Kingdom’s reputation. At that time, there was some diplomatic discussion on the part of Saudi officials to find a solution to deal with child custody in a practical manner. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia is still not a party to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and the Kingdom has not created other international agreements to deal with child custody disputes.
This problem can be ignored but it will not vanish. In fact, it is a situation, which now has the potential to be even uglier than in the past. Individuals harnessing the power of the World Wide Web can sway public opinion, sometimes resulting in political leaders taking national positions in matters that began as private family disputes. Time and again it’s been noted that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. With tens of thousands of its young Saudi men and women studying abroad and no international child custody agreements in place, the Kingdom should at least get prepared for a world of hurt.
