Getting Hagued : the impact of international law on child abduction by protective mothers

'Protective mothers’ is a term used in the literature on child abuse to refer to women who take proactive steps to protect their children from abuse and violence. Protective mothers who take children overseas to bring violence or abuse to an end are increasingly finding themselves the subject of a petition under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (‘Hague Convention’). The Hague Convention was formulated in the late 1970s prior to widespread recognition of the role of abuse and violence in separation and divorce. It requires the prompt return of children taken from one signatory country to another with only narrow and limited exceptions. This article argues that the Hague Convention has the effect of trivialising domestic violence and child abuse and perpetuating stereotypes of protective mothers as mentally ill and malicious. One website for protective mothers calls this experience ‘getting Hagued’. This article will examine how those drafting and then interpreting the Hague Convention have misunderstood the gendered nature of international child abduction before going on to analyse the impact of ‘getting Hagued’ in two important Australian cases of international child abduction.