Tamara “Tammi” Hamby, a former Crawford County Library Board member, plans to use Arkansas’ “choice of evils” defense against charges arising after orchestrating an insane staged kidnapping of her 22-year-old daughter, who has developmental and physical disabilities. According to prosecutors, Hamby organized a frightening “scare tactic” intended to teach her daughter a lesson about online strangers. The allegations state that Hamby recruited her daughter’s caregiver and two men to lure the daughter away, wear masks, restrain her with zip ties and tie her to a tree, after which Hamby was supposed to appear and “rescue” her. The plan allegedly went wrong when the men took her to the wrong location; she escaped, was tackled and restrained again, and ultimately freed herself and called 911 while believing she was in genuine danger.
Hamby faces felony charges that reportedly include kidnapping, false imprisonment, battery, terroristic threatening and abuse of an endangered or impaired person. Tammi Hamby could theoretically face up to 36 years in prison if convicted of criminal conspiracy to commit kidnapping and first degree endangering the welfare of an incompetent person. The defense argues that otherwise criminal conduct was necessary to prevent a greater, imminent harm. Hamby’s attorneys are expected to claim that she acted because her daughter was communicating online with a suspected scammer or predator impersonating country singer Luke Bryan, and that ordinary efforts to stop the contact had failed. The central issue at trial will likely be whether the feared online danger was sufficiently immediate and serious to legally justify the staged abduction.
Hearing this should shock you—this isn’t something that any normal parent does. This is not just physically abusive (due to the fact the daughter was physically kidnapped), but also emotionally abusive, due to the major impact that extreme behavior from parents like this can have on children. This story is horrifying for many reasons. First of all, this story reflects the idea that I’ve been saying for so long when it comes to overprotective and oppressive parents. Parents who enforce overbearing restrictions over their children’s internet access and ability to communicate with others online, to “protect” them, are often abusive, controlling and downright insane. A mother took her daughter who was already vulnerable due to being developmentally disabled, then decided to put her in an extremely dangerous, threatening and stressful situation, all to enforce overbearing control of her daughter’s internet access.
Several media outlets reported that according to Hamby and her husband, the kidnapping attempt was to “teach her a lesson”, and to “protect her” from predators. Stories like this show the true nature of parents who fight for “online safety” for their children. It’s not about safety—it’s about control. If the mother actually wanted to protect her daughter from a perceived harm of the internet, then she would have done so in a supportive way, rather than risking her safety. The entire orchestrated kidnapping was meant to do one thing—instill fear into the daughter in order to punish her from straying from her mother’s control. The mother wanted to traumatize her daughter, the mother wanted her daughter living in fear. This is not normal—this is insane—and unfortunately, so many controlling parents have this mindset of preferring their children to be living in fear instead of letting them have freedom.
Another important element to consider in this is how the mother’s heinous actions are likely to have caused long lasting trauma on the daughter. Under standard PTSD diagnostic criteria, an event can qualify as traumatic when a person directly experiences actual or threatened death or serious injury. The threat does not have to later prove genuine; what matters psychologically is that the person experienced the situation as a serious threat. Someone who believed masked strangers had kidnapped and restrained her could therefore experience the same acute fear response as a victim of a genuine planned abduction, even if the perpetrators privately intended to release her. Possible longer term symptoms include intrusive memories, nightmares, avoidance of reminders, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle responses, sleep disruption, emotional detachment and persistent feelings of danger.
Research involving actual kidnapping survivors demonstrates that these events can have enduring psychiatric consequences. A study of people kidnapped in Sardinia found a 45.9% lifetime rate of PTSD and a 37.5% lifetime rate of major depression among the survivors studied. The likelihood of PTSD increased with the number of violent experiences endured during captivity, while humiliation and deprivation were also associated with harmful psychological responses. The study involved more prolonged kidnappings than the alleged Crawford County incident, so its percentages cannot be applied directly, but it shows that forced confinement and fear during abduction can have effects lasting well beyond the event itself.
The physical restraint by the perpetrators of the staged kidnapping is incredibly relevant to the trauma impact in this case. A systematic review of seclusion and restraint in adult psychiatric settings found evidence of harmful psychological consequences, including traumatic reactions. Another systematic review examining physically restrained intensive care patients concluded that restraint may be associated with subsequent PTSD. Medical restraint differs from an intentional staged kidnapping, but these studies are important because restraints in medical settings are normally imposed for safety and still can be experienced as terrifying, powerless and traumatic. Being forcibly restrained by masked strangers while believing oneself kidnapped could reasonably be even more frightening.
The involvement of the victim’s mother and caregiver could add another dimension known as betrayal trauma. Psychological research describes betrayal trauma as harm caused or enabled by someone whom the victim trusts or depends upon. Studies and reviews associate caregiver perpetrated abuse with dissociation, altered emotional processing, difficulties disclosing abuse and disruption of trust. Researcher Steven Rachman has also described betrayal as potentially producing shock, grief, anger, obsessive preoccupation, diminished self-esteem and life altering changes. In a situation like this, discovering that a parent or caregiver helped arrange the terrifying experience could undermine the victim’s sense that the people responsible for protecting her are safe and trustworthy.
All of this research put together shows how the false kidnapping, especially the aspects of being restrained, and learning this is coming from her own parent/caregiver, has the potential to cause extreme trauma within the daughter. So the effects of the kidnapping isn’t limited to the physical abuse she felt in the instance, it could last years in advance. The saddest part about this story, is that the trauma was the intention. The mother intentionally wanted to give her daughter trauma related to kidnapping, as a scare tactic to prevent her from communicating with others online. This daughter trusted her mother to protect her and keep her safe, and instead, her safety was endangered for extremely selfish reasons in the corrupted name of “protection”. Imagine the betrayal you would feel to find out that the person responsible for keeping her safe orchestrated your own kidnapping. Imagine a mother—someone who supposedly has the best interests of her daughter at heart—deciding to give her permanent trauma as a scare tactic to “teach her a lesson”. That isn’t normal, it’s abusive.
Looking into the family’s background, even more disturbing connections can be made. Before joining the Crawford County Library Board, Hamby and her husband reportedly worked with the conservative Christian group River Valley City Elders in late 2022 to campaign against LGBTQ+ books available through the county library system. Hamby argued that such books promoted “homosexual lifestyles,” “gender confusion,” and drag queens, and she wrote to county officials seeking greater parental control over materials that treated LGBTQ+ relationships as equivalent to heterosexual relationships. Hamby was subsequently appointed to the library board in early 2023 and became its chair. While serving on the board, she proposed giving the board authority to review and make the final decision on books before the library purchased and added them to its collection. That proposal was initially tabled and later withdrawn, but the board moved forward with revising library policies.
During the broader controversy, the Crawford County Library System moved certain LGBTQ+ themed children’s books into a separate “social section.” Parents sued, arguing that this amounted to viewpoint-based censorship. In 2024, a federal judge ruled that the section had been created substantially to impede access to books expressing viewpoints considered unpopular or controversial in Crawford County, and the books were ordered returned to their original sections.
When looking at this background, it’s clear that there’s yet another alternative motive for the mother’s behavior. Social media is the main way that young people can be exposed to the free-flow of information, the main way they keep up with current events, and the main way they can advocate for ideas they believe in. This is the main reason that oppressive and overly conservative parents restrict internet access for their children—to keep them from accessing information they deem as wrong. A lot of the time, this includes LGBTQ materials, and anything related to queer lifestyles, which is exactly what Hamby had directly fought to censor. So if she was already fighting to censor LGBTQ materials from young people in her community, then it is reasonable to assume that she would want to censor information that her own daughter could access. Because of this, it’s likely that Hamby’s motivation for orchestrating a false kidnapping of her daughter to teach “online safety”, had nothing to do with predators, and everything to do with associating the internet with fear to further cut her daughter off from viewpoints that differ from Hamby’s christian conservatism.
The pattern here is all too common: a conservative, religious parent wants to censor information and literature from children to “protect” them. But “protection” couldn’t be further from the truth—and that was shown with her blatant disregard for her daughter’s safety and mental health. Individuals like this, who want to control internet access for youth, and censor books relating to topics they dislike, only do this for control. To them, it’s their way or the highway—there is no room for alternate viewpoints, and young people get to make their own decisions and discover themselves. The internet is threatening to them, LGBTQ books are threatening to them. Why? Because it threatens their power. It threatens the control they are trying to have at the younger generation. Because their corrupted viewpoints can only carry on when young people aren’t exposed to any outside information. Religious conservatism, online restrictions, book censorship, and parental oppression are all part of a broader web of control meant to separate young individuals from alternate viewpoints, and indoctrinate them into political and religious ideologies.
Despite the fact that her daughter is a grown individual with her own agency, her parents still somehow felt this was okay, because it played into their own authority. Parents oftentimes view their children—and by extension, disabled adults—as their property. They have the mindset that since they are the “caretaker”, they deserve to “own” them, and can therefore exercise their authority in whatever way they choose, despite the risks to the individual’s mental, emotional and physical health.
Hamby’s husband stated: “We couldn’t talk her into understanding that danger existed, and so we wanted to show her that evil does exist.”
They succeeded at one thing—showing her that evil exists. However, the evil is not coming from a random person on the internet, it’s coming from right inside the home, by the people that the daughter was supposed to trust. And that’s the real lesson of stories like this—the biggest threats to children are usually not random individuals they meet online, or even random people on the street. The biggest threats to children—who are most likely to be responsible for their abuse (either sexual, physical, or otherwise), are the parents and caretakers meant to be protecting them.
However, governments and parents always over-amplify the harms of the internet and online access for young people, and use this to push online restrictions for youth, while regularly ignoring the obvious threat from inside the home. The government should not be putting their energy into regulating social media under the guise of “protecting children”, they should be regulating oppressive parents, to prevent situations like this from ever occurring in the first place.
Tammi Hamby should be convicted of all charges, and sentenced to the full extent of the law—not just because of her horrible actions towards her vulnerable daughter but also to send a message. Parents who may act like this, or who may hold similar mindsets to her need to understand that they have no right to treat their children like this. They have no right to use trauma as a method of punishment and control. Children and disabled adults deserve to be loved, supported, and cared for by their parents—not tortured.
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, of any similar behavior by your own parents, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
Photo of Mugshot of Tammi Hamby from Crawford County Sheriff’s Office.
Crawford County Courthouse in Van Buren, Arkansas. Photo by Clinton Seeds, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped from the original.
The text of Disabled Daughter Kidnapped by Insane Mother in “Scare Tactic” about Online Safety © 2026 by Zane Miller is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
