British mothers who bring their children with them when returning to the UK after fleeing from domestic abuse abroad – which can lead to them being accused of abduction – could be given greater legal protection and support.
The government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child abduction cases, with a view to giving survivors of domestic abuse more help fighting partners' demands that they return children to their home countries.
The changes would come too late for Claire, who lived in the US with an abusive partner and their two small children for more than a decade. But they could help mothers like her.
"We were all terrified of him. I was in near-constant fear for my life," she said. "Eventually, I escaped and got us all on a plane back home to the UK."
She lived in hiding for three months, but eventually had to apply for benefits. "Within a day, the police were at our door with summons under the Hague convention to appear in court just nine days later," she said.
Approximately 500 Hague-convention applications for the return of a child are filed each year in England and Wales. Between 10% and 20% of children affected end up being separated from their primary carer owing to a formal court-ordered return.
Claire was fortunate: she used all of her savings to instruct a barrister, and her children were able to stay in the UK.
"I barely stood any chance even with legal representation – all my evidence of the domestic abuse was ignored," she said. "It was only because my barrister persuaded the judge to let my oldest child, who was a few weeks short of the 14 years when courts will listen to their views, give evidence that I won the case."
The new analysis, to be carried out by the Ministry of Justice's private international family law team, will look at all cases held in the high court in London between 2024 and 2025 under the 1980 Hague convention.
The convention requires signatory countries to return children who have been unilaterally removed abroad within six weeks so that courts in their home countries can decide on future arrangements.
Campaigners hope the analysis, the first of its kind, will disprove the four-decade-old assumptions, baked into the convention, that all child abduction is harmful and that children must be returned immediately for overseas courts to decide their futures.
Ruth Dineen, international coordinator of the Filia Hague Mothers campaign, said the convention had been introduced in 1980 to protect children from the harmful effects of their wrongful removal from their home country.
"But the circumstances surrounding international child abduction have changed substantially since then," she said. "There are far more relationships between parents of different nationalities, so it's much more common for families to live abroad. We also have a far greater understanding of the impact of domestic abuse and coercive control."
Roz Osborne, head of the charity Globalarrk, said she hoped the government analysis would help level the playing field for victims of domestic abuse.
"At the moment, victims do not have access to equal legal support, due to legal aid inequalities, which causes delay or – worse – no legal representation at all for the victim survivor," she said. "Where respondents do not meet the means and merits test and pay, they can lose substantial funds, even when winning their case, putting them in debt.
"Victims have no access to emotional support in the high court, via a domestic abuse support worker," she added. Summary hearings do not allow sufficient understanding of the risks victims face, often underestimating the risks. Children's safety is inseparable from their primary carer's safety, most often the mother, and this is not recognised." In addition, she said, children were not acknowledged as victims in their own right, as they are under domestic abuse legislation in the UK.
Dr Adrienne Barnett, the director of Right to Equality, said there was a "dearth of basic data" around these cases. "On top of not knowing how often domestic violence is alleged and found, we don't even know what percentage of returning parents are mothers," she said.
"We don't know how many cases end in children being returned without their parent, whether the children say they don't want to be sent home or what protective measures are put in place when they are."
Lisa Smart, a Liberal Democrat MP and long-term campaigner on the shortcomings of the Hague convention, said the analysis was long overdue. "A parent – often but not always the mother – who escapes to this country to protect themselves and their children from violence should not find themselves faced with a legal mechanism that treats them as a wrongdoer," she said. "Yet that is precisely the situation too many find themselves in."
A Home Office spokesperson said there was no timeline for the new research but that it was "intended to provide robust evidence to inform possible future government policy on the effective operation of the convention in England and Wales in these complex and sensitive cases".
Alison Shalaby, the chief executive of Reunite, said it remained vital that children were returned immediately to their parents when abducted.
"The Hague convention provides a clear, unbiased court process that the left-behind parent can follow," she said. "It provides plenty of defences and opportunities for parents under the convention in England and Wales, where legal aid is available where there is domestic abuse."