A FILIA MVAWG PROJECT
A rock and a hard place.
The experiences of mothers who contact us have become noticeably more desperate and more complex in the past six months or so. This might be simply due to the fact that FiLiA Hague Mothers are becoming better known and that more mothers are reaching out to us; it might be a temporary ‘blip’; or perhaps it is related to the acknowledged increase in violence against women and children worldwide, driven by pornography and misogyny.
Whatever the reason, the heart-breaking stories highlight an indisputable fact: in cases where the father is an abuser, the Hague puts mothers in an impossible situation. Either she stays within the law and hopes that the state will protect her and her children, or she breaks the law and attempts to find safety in another country.
The former hope goes against all the evidence. Globally, states have shown themselves entirely incapable of protecting victims of abuse. Worldwide ‘1 in 3 women, around 736 million, will be victims of physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner’ (WHO 2021) and, on average, ‘a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every 11 minutes’ (UNODC Research 2020).
About
The Hague Mothers Campaign
Hague Mothers is a FiLiA MVAWG project. Our overarching aim is to end the injustices created by The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, specifically for mothers and children who are victims of domestic abuse. Our initial focus was on the UK, USA and Australia – we are now working globally.
Updates
Campaign News
Read the latest campaign updates and listen to the Hague Mothers episodes of the FiLiA Podcast.
A rock and a hard place
The experiences of mothers who contact us have become noticeably more desperate and more complex in the past six months or so. This might be simply due to the fact that FiLiA Hague Mothers are becoming better known and that more mothers are reaching out to us; it might be a temporary ‘blip’; or perhaps […]
How a TV documentary announcement sparked social media uproar in Japan
Lisa Ogawa, co-founder Hague Mothers Japan has sent us this report about media accounts of ‘child abduction’ and the growing feminist solidarity which is challenging this one-sided narrative. Some three months ago, in May 2024, Japan’s Diet (parliament) passed a bill introducing joint parental authority. While few oppose voluntary joint parental authority, many feared the possibility of court-mandated […]
FiLiA
A FiLiA MVAWG Project
FiLiA is an UK-based woman-led volunteer organisation with international reach and part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Our vision is a world free from patriarchy where all women and girls are liberated. Our mission is to (1) Build sisterhood & solidarity (locally, nationally, globally) (2) Amplify the voices of women (particularly those less often heard or purposefully silenced) (3) Defend women’s human rights. Our volunteer team has organised a Feminist conference since 2013.
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