The Hague Convention is Under Attack

Another example of women being placed above the law

Today I want to look at the Hague convention, summarised in this ABC article:

On October 25, 1980, it was signed between 23 countries, including Australia, as means to combat a prevalence of men who were kidnapping children after a marriage breakdown and taking them back to their home countries.

This Centre for Justice briefing paper quotes research that likewise says,

Its drafters intended it to address the situation where a non-custodial father took their child across international borders without permission from the child’s mother (Quillen, 2014, p. 625; Silberman, 2011, p. 736).

But it then acknowledges that:

It did not consider the circumstance where a custodial mother must cross international borders with her child to flee family and domestic violence (Quillen, 2014, p. 625), or that under the convention she would be termed an abductor (Keyes, 2019, p. 109; Bozin, 2016, pp. 22–42; Quillen, 2014, p. 625).

Summary - this was designed as a law against men. However, the facts reveal that it is being mostly broken by women.

The ABC article concedes this, saying:

According to Hague statistics, more than 73 per cent of "taking" parents globally are women.

Globalarrk, which stands for Global Action on Relocation and Return with Kids, is a charity which supports "stuck" families.

Its latest research says 93 per cent of abducting parents are mothers. Ninety-one percent had experienced some form of abuse, 37 per cent reporting physical abuse.

And while this article is from 2020, I recall Jacqueline Pascarl, whose children were abducted in one of Australia’s most famous cases (and who became an advocate for parents in this situation), saying back in the 90s that 70 percent of abductors were women.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to a backlash from the media, academia, and powerful women’s organisations to portray this law as being ‘weaponised’ against women. Simply typing “Hague Convention” into the search bar of the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC or the Guardian returns stories almost exclusively about the outrageous injustice of mothers being expected to follow international law, e.g. here, here and here. These are matched by similar pushes in academia occurring globally, e.g. this study in the US from 2010 looks at the issue of using domestic violence as a defence exclusively for women violating the law to enter the US.

Was this ever a male-dominated crime? Are men more likely to travel abroad to be married in foreign countries? It is difficult to find any period in history when this was true, and it does not appear to be the case today.

Moreover, when we take into account the demographics of those who abduct children domestically, it is likewise non-custodial mothers who are the majority perpetrators, whether here in Australia, the US, the UK or NZ (only the US has readily available hard data, but this is not in dispute): and this despite mothers getting the lion’s share of custody in domestic courts. There is a pattern here: women appear to feel entitled to custody of the children through the court system, and in those minority of cases where this does not play out accordingly, they then feel entitled to take the law into their own hands, whether domestically or across international boundaries.

The desire to paint men as the ‘prevalent’ perpetrators in clear contradiction of hard facts and figures, and women as victims of a ‘weaponised law’ when held accountable, demonstrates clearly that the ostensible purpose of the law - to protect children - has been ignored.

The law, unsurprisingly, has a ‘grave risk’ exception for situations involving abuse. The numbers quoted above are absurd - 91% of women claim to be abused. There is no domestic violence study that supports such an insane figure - if abuse was that prevalent, mothers would forbid their daughters to marry. Or are we meant to understand that only the women who are abused are trying to take their children with them when their relationships break down - as though there is some correlation between abuse and a mother believing she is entitled to custody of her children when the relationship ends? This assumption is equally untenable.

Nor is there any data to back up these absurd numbers. The briefing paper acknowledges a scholar named Weiner (2021) who comments:

There is no comprehensive data detailing the outcomes in cases involving domestic violence after children are returned. Nor do judges who return children despite a history of domestic violence receive feedback about what actually happens after the children depart… Media outlets, including the internet, produce a sample of anecdotal (and admittedly unconfirmed) hardship stories.

The probability is that, as with other situations where abuse is alleged in domestic custody battles, the majority of these claims would be false. Even the ABC in their ideologically biased reporting on custody issues cannot hide this: in this article we are told by a court expert:

‘I think in the Family Court, there are a lot of false allegations… In my experience, about 90 per cent are unfounded in this very small group that are highly conflicted. So, there is still sexual abuse and physical abuse that comes through, but a lot of the people who end up in the Family Court are highly motivated people, and highly competent people, so they're a different group from say the lower courts, or the Children's Court.'”

And let me stress, this is also not gendered: there will be men making false claims in there as well, including the feminist’s favourite target, that small proportion of controlling men who are abusing the system to perpetuate family violence. The point is not that women are more likely to lie or make false claims, it is the fact that the majority of perpetrators of this crime against children are women.

An aside: in the sort of insane moment that is becoming all too common in modern Australia, Attorney General Mark Dreyfuss was reported in 2022 as bringing in amendments to the federal law so “that judges can impose "very tight" conditions when issuing return orders “to protect a child from exposure to family or domestic violence even if the court is not satisfied that such violence has occurred or will occur”.” Let that sink in for a moment.

Leaving aside domestic violence that the court does not believe has or will occur, why is this crime so often perpetrated by mothers? The core reason, in my reading, is the entitled expectation that the mother should get preferential consideration in custody matters because children belong with their mother.

In all these various considerations of the ‘weaponising’ of the Hague convention against women, it is the women who are seen as the victims, not the children. It was never the intention of the Hague convention to prevent evil men running off with their children: the point was to protect custodial parents who had been determined by local courts as being the best custodians of the child, and to protect the child in their country of habitual residence.

The literature and the media both raise the spectre of harm coming to the child - something that an objective reading of the data will show is a concern for non-custodial fathers at least as much as non-custodial mothers - as well as the fear that women will be forced to return to violent or abusive relationships. The facts do not bear any of this out. The purpose of the Hague convention is, as the Briefing Paper explains, “the return of a child to their habitual residence is primarily ordered so that the courts in that jurisdiction can settle the custody dispute”: it does not order the return of the child to an abusive parent, let alone the return of a ‘fleeing woman’ to an alleged abuser. The study that the Briefing Paper carries out ultimately shows zero women in their small data set having to return to an alleged abuser.

A careful reading of the media coverage shows, not women having to return to abusive relationships, but rather women having to return to a foreign country they no longer have any desire to live in.

A mother whose marriage has broken down may have no means of support: the ABC article first quoted points out such a woman may not be in a position to “claim government benefits or housing [if] she is on a temporary resident visa and does not meet the criteria for permanent residency”. She may be isolated from family, in hardship, and understandably desiring to put the bad relationship behind her and get back to her own country, family, culture and support systems.

In taking the child, though, she is removing them from their own comfort zone, their home, be it their society or their home country, where things are familiar and make sense and which is a comfort to the child even if their parents are fighting and splitting up and the rest of their world is falling apart: taking them away from friends and the other parent and the other parent’s family, possibly the only family they have ever known. To do this to a child is to harm them.

This principle underpins child protection right down to the local level. When a child is removed for their safety in my home state (NSW) they are placed with emergency foster care or (when I worked there, on many occasions) in emergency hotel accommodation with youth workers. This is extremely stressful on the kids, and one thing done to maintain some sort of normality was to ensure the child(ren) went to their regular, familiar school the next day and had a “normal day”. Even if the only available foster carer was on the other side of the city and a driver had to take them on a two-hour trip each way, it was worth it so the kid had some sort of normality in a life otherwise turned upside down. A regular routine of going to their class, seeing their teacher, seeing their friends etc. This is so very important. (I can attest to this, seeing the reactions of kids to me as a returning youth worker - just having my familiar face was something for them to cling to, even though they might have only have met me a couple of days before.)

To rip a child from their country, their society, half their family, their home and friends and life, is effectively a crime against the child, no matter how much mum (or dad) may want to get the hell out of there, get back to “their” normal society and put a bad relationship behind them.

Feminists should stop screeching about the law being ‘weaponised’ against women and start asking - why are women overwhelmingly breaking this law that is so obviously designed to protect the child’s best interest?

Sadly, once again, we see that the predominant perpetrators of harm to children are their own mothers.