Dutch teenager Laura Dekker, the ambitious girl who wants to sail around the world, wrote that she ran away last Friday, never to come back.
A letter which the 14-year-old wrote to her father before she got onto a plane to the Caribbean is quoted in Thursday's daily Algemeen Dagblad.
She used her New Zealand passport to cross Dutch border controls and escape from her status as a ward of court. A member of the public on the island of St Maarten spotted Laura and alerted the police.
She flew back to Amsterdam and is now staying with relatives.
Laura wrote, "I've gone to find my freedom. I no longer want anything to do with the Netherlands and I'll never return. It's driving me crazy, the whole world wants to talk to me. They'll try and postpone my sailing trip until I'm 18. They've almost succeeded in breaking me. But I've plucked up the courage to try and get my life in order."
A court in the city of Utrecht on Wednesday gave Laura's father custody of her, so she can continue to live with her father. The girl's parents are separated and her mother publicly broke off all ties with her daughter on Wednesday. The Child Care Bureau wanted to place Laura in a foster home, but the judges saw insufficient grounds for such a decision.
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Laura Dekker's father is a bit of a misfit when it comes to caring for her. Something tells me Laura was heavily influenced to sail around the world by her father who wants to live vicariously through her glory.
On the other hand, the fact that the state has the power to make any child a ward of the state is totalitarian in essence, regardless of whether she comes from parents who live apart. The audacity of Child Care Bureau that wanted to place Laura in a foster home, separate her from both parents, is enough to make any child go crazy and want to run away from the state that likes to meddle in people's private affairs. As long as Laura is not being psychologically or psychically abused, the state has no business interfering.
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