^You are checked without you knowing so many times when leaving the UK you wouldn't believe it. API details, the check in desks...and they are the "visible" ones.
Children travelling in or out of the UK with one parent only have been the subject of extra scrutiny since at least the early 90s.
The UK is still probably one if the hardest places to abduct a child from. At least if you intend to do it via an airport.^
I wholeheartedly disagree. I’m not very familiar with the system in non-European countries, but let’s for a moment compare flying out of the UK with flying out of a EU Schengen country, i.e. (at the time of writing) all of the EU except Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and of course the UK.
Exit border checks. They exists in the Schengen area, but not in the UK. There is no Border Agency official checking the documents of those flying from London to Madrid or New York. Yes, you have to submit API details, details of the passport or ID cards of each passenger, but none of this proves who has parental responsibility for the child, nor the relationship between an adult and a child travelling together.
I have no doubt there are a lot of ‘invisible’ checks, but I imagine these would catch people like suspects or convicts trying to flee the country – again, nothing to do with checking who has parental responsibility for a minor.
Without official border checks, checks are left to the airline. Easyjet has a description here: www.easyjet.com/en/terms-and-conditions/infants-and-children It lists specific ID requirements, including in most cases some sort of authorisation from those with parental responsibility, for Czech, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian children – not for British ones.
Airlines tend to check passports, but, again, they tend not to perform any checks whatsoever on whether the adult can take the child abroad, at least not when it comes to British children (see above). When my wife took DD abroad (with my knowledge, of course!) Easyjet staff checked both their passports, period. DD was very little and sleeping. They have different surnames. Easyjet had no way whatsoever of knowing that my wife was, in fact, the mother.
Obtaining the passport It is crazy that the authorisation of just one parent is enough. The authorisation of both might be needed for unmarried parents, not sure, but it certainly wasn’t needed in our case (we are married). One of us could have obtained DD’s passport without the other parent’s consent nor knowledge and taken DD abroad. Only some countries have specific extradition agreements with the UK; if I had been, say, Russian and taken DD to Russia because I wanted to leave my wife, the chances of extraditing me and bringing DD back to the UK would have been slim to say the least.
Btw, the Foreign Office has some statistics on international child abduction: www.gov.uk/government/news/new-fco-figures-show-parental-child-abduction-cases-on-the-rise
The lack of exit border checks is particularly worrying in those cases when a parent has ties to another country, and could give a child a passport of that country. You can get a court order asking the UK Passport Office not to issue a passport to your child, but foreign consulates are under no obligation to respect it. This is particularly worrying in those cases where just one parent can obtain a passport, without the other’s consent.
Of course all these points would make no difference whatsoever to those cases where an abduction takes place after a holiday abroad both parents had consented to (eg taking the child to visit relatives in country X, then keeping him/her there), but still, I couldn’t disagree more that the UK is one of the hardest places to abduct a child from.
To be clear, my wife and I are not separating, nor do we have any reason to fear that the other would abduct DD! We were simply both quite shocked at how easy child abduction can potentially be in the UK.