Pubdate: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 Source: Advertiser, The (Australia) Contact: Page 18 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