Getting ‘Hagued’: How One International Law Enables Intimate Partner Violence

When Carolina Gouveia brought her newborn, Chris, from Canada to her native Brazil, she had no idea that she was violating an international treaty.

Gouveia had gone to Canada to study English when she met Chris’ father in British Columbia and fell in love. But a month after her son was born in 2017, Gouveia filed for divorce. According to court records, she had reported domestic violence at least twice during her pregnancy.

Gouveia was still on a student visa at the time, so she was provided with public counsel, who told her that, given her isolation and lack of support in Canada — and her fear of living in proximity to her ex-husband — she could leave.

“The lawyer told me I could go back to my country with Chris and then request his custody from there,” she told WMC Women Under Siege. Gouveia was Chris’ primary caregiver at the time and was in the process of formally applying for sole guardianship in Canada when she went to Brazil, trusting the counsel she was given.

Her lawyer was not aware of the Hague Convention.

The 1980 Hague Convention defines international child abduction as the “wrongful” removal or retention of children away from their country of “habitual residence,” accompanied by a parent or custodian. “Wrongful,” in this instance, refers to the disapproval of the trip — or its eventual extension — by the “left-behind parent,” who then calls for the child’s return.

103 nations and counting have joined the treaty, including the United States, which has the greatest incidence rates for both incoming and outgoing procedures under the Hague Convention. (In 2022 alone, the US had a total of 657 active abduction cases.)

In 75 percent of cases today, the “left-behind parent” is the father, according to the latest official data from the Hague Conference of Private International Law (HCCH).

Gouveia said that her ex-husband had agreed to the relocation, but a year later, she got “hagued” in Brazil.

Getting “hagued” is a term triggered as soon as the international “abductor” is notified to return the child. National authorities from the country of habitual residence — and of the left-behind parent — request the child’s return under penalty of facing courts and even Interpol. Not all countries criminalize abduction (meaning that the parent removing the child does not always face criminal penalties), but the repercussions for the child’s custody are far-reaching.

After an expensive judicial battle, Gouveia was ordered by Brazilian courts to return Chris to Canada. A return order acknowledges that the child was in fact “abducted,” so mothers are considered a risk to their children; they are not allowed to be alone with them again until custody has been settled. Over the next two years, Gouveia had no more than five hours total with her son, in a few supervised visits. Last year, the court revoked her custody.

To stay or to leave

In the 21st century, their stories have grown all too common: women travel and live abroad, fall in love, and start a family away from their home country.

“When it doesn’t work out, of course you want to go back to your homeland, where you count on emotional and logistical support, even your language,” said Spanish attorney Carolina Marín Pedreño, who also litigates in England.

In the last decade, an estimated 15,000 women across the globe have been accused of abducting their own children (according to data from official reports in 2008, 2015, and 2021). Like Gouveia, they are all foreigners who tried to relocate with their children — oftentimes back to their home countries — but the other parent disagreed.

In lack of agreement with the father, these foreign mothers are then confronted with only three choices over their children: abide, abduct, or abandon.

Abiding means remaining in the country where their children were born, where the mothers are likely seen as outsiders and struggle without family, community, or support. In many cases, these circumstances also trap them in risky situations of domestic and intimate partner violence.

Mothers who abduct often do so as a desperate measure to seek support. Whether aware of the Hague Convention or not, most of them are trying to protect themselves and their children from abuse.

In 2008, 24-year-old Cassandra Hasanovic was brutally murdered by her ex-husband mere months after returning to England to pursue a custody battle with her abuser. She had fled with their children to escape him and got “hagued” in Australia, where she had relatives.

Hasanovic was on her way to a women’s refuge — a journey for which she’d pleaded for a police escort but was denied — when her ex-husband appeared, dragged her out of the car, and stabbed her to death in front of their children and Hasanovic’s mother.

“Sending the child of the domestic violence victim back to the location where the taking partner, usually the mother, is unsafe, puts the taking parent in front of the impossible choice of choosing between their own safety or that of their children,” warned three Special Rapporteurs from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) last September, pointing to the Convention’s gendered application.

These mothers don’t just leave for safety reasons but also for health and economic challenges that make their lives unbearable, leading some to make perhaps the most devastating decision of the three: leaving the country without their children. According to a survey from Global Arrk, a British non-profit assisting “stuck parents” (defined by the organization as “single migrant families”), 81 percent reported to have suffered domestic abuse, and 29 percent have had to return home.

Stella Furquim, another Brazilian woman, tried to relocate her two sons from Canada to the Netherlands without getting “hagued,” so she opted for an agreement with her ex-husband. But he chose instead to force her to pursue their international relocation through Quebec’s courts, where she lost her legal bid to leave with them and, therefore, her custody over them.

None of the presented records of abuse during her marriage or after her divorce were taken into account in the custody battle, she told WMC Women Under Siege. Sadly, she had no other choice but to leave without her sons.

Two years later, she returned to Canada. Her ex-husband’s abuse, she learned, had turned to their children.

Furquim is now the co-founder of Gambe, an international grassroots organization that assists women living abroad, including “hagued” moms like Gouveia, who has received not only legal support from the organization but also much-needed moral support.

Devastating consequences

Gouveia is allowed three supervised half-hour video calls a week with her son, who is now six years old. The calls must be in English, unless Gouveia pays for an interpreter, but there’s no need. Chris is losing his mother tongue, she said, and has now learned how to say “I want to hang up” to her in English.

“It was obvious that was gonna happen,” said Gouveia. “What kid wants to spend 30 minutes in front of a screen just talking to an adult?”

She fears that he is even forgetting who his mother is.

Gouveia’s ex-husband had been arrested when he physically assaulted her while she was pregnant, but he avoided criminal prosecution after law enforcement offered him an anger management course, which he completed. In pursuit of his son’s custody, however, Gouveia’s ex-husband denied the violence, claiming that he had struggled with English at the time of his arrest and didn’t understand the deal he had taken. The judge found his denial plausible and considered the real danger to be the international abduction — which, she ruled, could only be prevented by limiting the mother’s access to her son.

“That’s the pattern in Hague cases,” said Furquim. “Upon the child’s return to the country of habitual residence, no family court will keep the custody of an expat mother accused of international abduction, no matter the context.”

To make matters worse, Gouveia lost all parental authority rights over her son.

Last September, Gouveia’s ex-husband took Chris to Lebanon without Gouveia’s knowledge or her consent. And because Lebanon hasn’t signed the Hague Convention, his international child abduction is not bound by the same return protocol once imposed on Gouveia in Brazil.

And Gouveia can’t follow; she’s still applying for residency in Canada, so she can’t leave the country.

“I lost my son,” she cried.

The treaty’s shifting gender discrimination

Before the Hague Convention was codified, it was foreign fathers who abducted their children, usually to their home country. There was no provision or even a name to call it back then. While the Convention was designed to address international child abductions without targeting any gender, it had one in mind anyway.

International child abduction was considered “traumatic” for breaking up the relationship with the child’s referent adult — who was supposedly the mother.

“The true victim of ‘childnapping’ is the child himself, who suffers from the sudden upsetting of his stability, the traumatic loss of contact with the parent who has been in charge of his upbringing,” wrote Spanish jurist Elisa Pérez-Vera, author of the official explanatory report on the Convention as its official rapporteur, in 1981.

“The social reality to which we tried to respond was one of kidnappers, mostly males, who were not also holders of custody rights, and who took children away from their mothers,” Pérez-Vera admitted in an interview for the Uruguayan newspaper la diaria this February.

It wasn’t until the ’90s that shared custody arrangements would arise. Today, about 87 percent of the “taking parents” have custody rights over their children, according to the latest HCCH report.

The switch in assumed gender roles came with globalization and the progress made in women’s rights, especially in the 21st century. Pursuing equality and freedom in the ’70s also provided women with the autonomy to move around the globe alone, which produced more multicultural families with an expat mother (instead of an expat father) than there had ever been before.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the prevalence of domestic violence. “In the past, fathers would abduct their children as revenge on their exes,” said Spanish attorney Marín-Pedreño. “Now, I see men requesting their children’s return as a weapon against the mother, to control them after separation.”

“Gender-based violence was not taken into account,” Pérez-Vera told la diaria. “If I had to draft it today, I would think about it.”

For Pérez-Vera, “It’s time to try to reinterpret the Convention in such a way that it continues to meet its main objective”: that of protecting children who are “victims of disagreements between adults,” she said.

A matter of human rights

Last October, the eighth meeting to review the 1980 Hague Convention convened. Signatory countries and the HCCH agreed to start a working group on domestic violence for “discussions amongst organizations representing parents and children, and those applying the Convention.”

Marín-Pedreño, who was invited to the meeting as an expert, advocated for international family relocation to be uniformly ruled in signatory countries in order to prevent abductions.

Furquim, in turn, wants international law to recognize that “child removal is not ‘wrongful’ when the taking parent is fleeing domestic abuse,” she said. “By simply changing that, thousands of mothers and children across the world could be spared.”

Several countries are already making promising steps to tackle domestic violence under the Hague Convention. In June 2022, for the first time, the UN Child Rights Committee manifested concerns about the Convention. Based on the international Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), OHCHR’s thematic body condemned Chile for violating human rights of an autistic six-year-old boy whose return to Spain was determined after his Chilean mother had been accused of international abduction.

The following December, Australia issued a decree requiring judges to recognize abuses and avoid arbitrary returns. Four months later, Mexico’s Supreme Court determined that all kinds of violence against the mother expose the child to an “intolerable situation” so as to deny requests of return. Colombia did the same last September, while also urging courts to apply a gender lens to abduction cases.

And, in Brazil, a law project to include domestic violence as one of the treaty’s exceptions for a child’s return is now in front of the Federal Senate after approval by deputies. Unlike the HCCH’s judicial guide, the proposal acknowledges the “irreparable harm” that domestic violence may have on children exposed to it, whether directly or not.

Similar debates have taken place throughout 2023, such as a speech in the UK’s Parliament and a state bodies conference in Spain.

It may come too late for her case, but Furquim is still hopeful that a world in which women can fully exercise their right to live free from violence is within reach. It’ll be an uphill battle, she realizes, as long as laws don’t accurately address the reality of the issue.

“That’s the problem with women’s rights,” she said. “We have to fight for them, and once we have them, we have to fight for the right to use them. There were no laws addressing domestic violence when the Hague Convention emerged. Now it’s forbidden, but victims are discredited and penalized. Even when we win, we lose.”