136
Domestic abuse victims who flee with children overseas to be criminalised under new law
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
136 points (99.3% liked)
News
36891 readers
2521 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The work to strip abusive parents of their rights and prevent them from being harmed by their parents needs to happen before criminalizing the safe parent for removing them from the situation.
If 75% of women who abduct the child (if the stat in the article is accurate) are doing so because of DV, then that work has not been done. If someone looks at their own situation and has had other attempts to gain safety removed from them, and they see a way out by taking their children from the country, they are morally correct for doing so and the failure is on the part of their local social systems and government. If the law cares for its obligation to the rights of children to physical safety more than the rights of abusive parents to have unmitigated access to their children, putting the safe parent in prison for trying to protect their child is the wrong move.
It is illegal to beat your spouse and threaten to kill them, and it is illegal to do this to their children. We both agree that a parent who does this should not have rights to their children. Why are they not having this happen? Is it because one or both parents are immigrants? Can the government be doing more to ensure the safety of DV victims in these situations?
This law is the cart before the horse if the goal is protecting children and maintaining their rights to physical safety. There should be an exception for people fleeing violence. Otherwise, it should be criminalized, sure.
This is what abductors may claim. They may claim they are "protecting the children" when in fact they are depriving the other parent any and all contact with their children, just because they don't like their ex. Do a quick Google search, there are plenty of stories like that.
If one of the parents have a criminal conviction for domestic abuse, i. e. the abuse is a fact rather than a claim, sure.
Otherwise abduction remains abduction. Children are not a property and they do not "belong" to one of the parents. Both of the parents have equal rights to raise their children.
The problem is that the isolated victim has to navigate a hostile legal system. Look around the internet, as you said. You'll see all sorts of stories about abuse being ignored by the legal system because the system failed them.
But there does need to be evidence and process, especially since abduction is a form of abuse as well. It harms the child to be removed from a safe parent, so it is a legal, social, and ethical responsibilty we have to make sure the parent is actually dangerous.
(And we should take DV seriously enough to devote resources to actually investigate these cases with everyone involved having a thorough knowledge of what DV is and isn't. And we should also devote resources to having a safe foster care system for when neither parent is safe, and we should transform social work into a desirable career with good pay, benefits, and acceptable work life balance, so cases are investigated before in a timely manner so victims are mostly all informed of who they can contact to escape within the country when they need to)
Someone legitimately fearing bodily harm or death for them or their child needs to be allowed to flee that harm. This should not be criminalized. DV needs to be an exception, until such a point that the safety net within the country is easy to find and access for everyone who needs it. And until such a time as the legal system considers domestic violence a serious crime even when it's perpetrated by people they like and want to believe against people they don't (against men, immigrants, the mentally ill, the marginalized, drug addicts, sex workers, etc)
Outside of the law, if someone fears harm to their child, they should flee as fast and far as they can, and are morally correct to do so. The law should support the morally correct position as best it can.
Do you accept that both parents have identical rights to raise and decide about their children?
Rights that are abrogated at the moment of violence.
So, do you accept that both parents have identical rights to raise and decide about their children?
Parents who do not have their parental rights taken away by the lawful judgement of the courts of course.
Are you talking legally? I believe parents should legally lose all rights to their child when (at the moment) they use violence against them, and if it turns out they were violent, there was no abduction because the safe parent had the right to travel with their child. Since this is not how the law works, currently, DV should be an exception to the proposed law in order to keep abusive parents from using the law as against their victims. Resources should be devoted to ensuring the abuse happened, so false accusations can't be used by the abductor to justify kidnapping.
You still haven't answered my question.
Or rather, you have. By not answering 🙄
Each parent has the same legal right as the other, but neither is allowed to harm their kids, or they lose those rights.
Again, the right of a child to live free from abuse is greater than either parents' right to have them around. If it is illegal to protect a child from harm, or remove them from harm, it should not be. Courts should be equipped to figure out if the parents are safe for the child, and act accordingly. Removing a child from a parent who is harming them is good and correct, even if the parent who does it doesn't know english well enough to follow correct protocol. Removing a child from a safe parent through abduction is bad. The parent who does this is harming the child and should not have access to that child to prevent them from doing it again. The best interests of the child far, far outweigh parental rights. Parental rights are nothing, if they don't benefit the child. This is my answer. Did you get your gotcha yet?
Yes. At the point when they lose their rights, they no longer can stop the other parent from permanently taking children abroad so it is a non issue.
This legislation is to stop one parent taking the children away without consent of the other parent, abducting them - and I am delighted it has been introduced.