The Office of Children's Issues was created in 1994 under the leadership of Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mary Ryan and that of her successor Maura Harty.

[3] In recognition of the fact that the U.S. State Department would not voluntarily inform Congress, U.S. courts, law enforcement authorities, family law attorneys or the general public about the gross noncompliance of foreign countries in adhering to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, Congress enacted an annual reporting requirement obligating the State Department to publish a detailed annual report on the reliability and effectiveness of the Convention in protecting and securing the return of abducted American children in foreign countries.

Maureen Dabbagh, mother of a daughter abducted to Syria, used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire her OCI files and was shocked by “page after page of slanderous, insulting comments made about me and comments trivializing my case.”[6] In 2003, Joel Mowbray, the journalist credited with exposing the still running "Visa Express" program of the U.S. State Department long after it allowed the entry of at least 15 of the 18 hijackers of 9/11 wrote the book "Dangerous Diplomacy" on the role and culture of the U.S. State Department.

Mowbray's second chapter in "Dangerous Diplomacy", titled "Cold Shoulder: State's Smallest Victim's", is dedicated to an analysis of the assistance provided to American parents left in the wake of an international child abduction.

This inherent conflict of interest between the two roles is magnified by what the book defines as the "culture of state", a culture characterized by extreme moral relativism, valuing process over substance and misplaced priorities that reward failures by promotions or high paying jobs "consulting" for the foreign government of the country that they'd previously been paid to advocate America's interests in.