Stephen Brown, Caseworker in the FCO’s Child Abduction Section
I already had some experience of assisting British nationals before I took up the job of child abduction caseworker at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) two and a half months ago. When I applied for the vacancy I was the Vice Consul at a British Consulate-General overseas and had been for the previous three years. It was time to go home and I wanted to make sure that all those consular skills I had honed overseas would not go to waste. I knew working on child abduction would be a complete change from helping people with psychiatric problems, prison detainees and a myriad of other assistance cases in a foreign country. I also knew a little bit about what ‘parental child abduction’ meant and what the FCO could and could not do to help left-behind parents.
What I was surprised by, however, was the high number of cases we work on, on a daily basis, and the complexity of them. I was also surprised by the fact that many of the left-behind parents I speak to are fathers seeking advice on how to deal with their partners or ex-partners taking their children overseas without their permission. A popular misconception is that it is only fathers who abduct children out of the UK. I’ve quickly learned that is not the case and would encourage fathers to speak to us early on if they have concerns about their child being abducted.
Although I am used to dealing with vulnerable people, speaking to left behind fathers /mothers, is a different kind of vulnerability. They are often parents who don’t know who to turn to and while we cannot, of course, go and get their children back, nor can we guarantee that their son or daughter will be returned to the UK even if the left-behind parent takes legal action here. That is one of the difficult issues in doing this job – there may be no ‘positive’ resolution for the left-behind parent. As a father of two daughters myself I know I would find that hard to cope with.
Still, not all hope is lost. Some parents do come to an agreement about the custody of their children and some left-behind parents do get regular access to their sons and/or daughters. Often this happens when both parents are able to put aside their differences in the best interests of the most important person in the dispute – the child. But these cases are not as frequent as we’d like which is why we think prevention of child abduction happening in the first place is so important.