4 sisters returned to Italian father after their Australian Mum took them to Australia.....dragged kicking and screaming onto the plane.

[AmberLeaf]

Apparently the girls aged between 9-15 are dual citizens.

Link sorry its the DM.

Do they not take the childs view into account in Australia?

differentname Im pretty sure LTEve said she doesnt know either way? so isnt passing judgement on anyone

Aside from the fact that practically everything the mother has said from the onset is lies.

That I don't believe the judge would have returned them to his care if he had previously broken their bones.

That the girls stated they missed him & wanted to return just last year.

The father was in the wrong to allow the children to be forced onto the plane by strangers = sounds like a judgement to me.

But in this case it has been found in court, by a judge, that a person has broken the law

Yes, yes, and she should be punished for that. I have NEVER disagreed with that. Despite what other posters on here have said, despite other posters trying to put words in my mouth, I DO NOT support what the mother did and never have.

What I am annoyed about is the amount of woman hating, goading and generally 'slagging her off' posts that are on here. Posts that are smug and judgmental. Post from the fathers FB that are seen as the truth. Posts from the mothers FB that are seen as lies.

Take Skippy's post above - when I said about the posts that had been deleted. She automatically decided that I meant posts that were abusive being deleted, and was sarky about it. They aren't the posts I meant. I saw two posts yesterday, one on the fathers FB page, one on the mothers. They were exactly the same posts asking exactly the same questions - of BOTH the parents. I saw some of the replies. The post and comments on the fathers pages have now been deleted. The post and comments on the mothers page have been left, warts and all.

So the fathers page looks all fine and dandy and the mothers page full of Vipers.

You know, like happens here when new posters only look at AIBU. Or posts about 'horrible little kids' without considering SN.

Should we continue to believe her, blindly? Or should we choose to believe the father who has yet to have any wrong-doing proven against him

How about not believing either of them?

How is this woman comparable to Ched Evans' victim?

The mother abducted 4 children .. therefore a perpetrator of crime
Ched Evans victim was raped .. therefore a victim of crime

I don't get that pairing, not at all.

But you are choosing to believe the mother - that's what you said: "I believe in the MN "I Believe You" campaign. I support it, I follow it and I help where I can. I refuse to blindly accept that ANYONE deserves the vitirol that has been shown on this thread."

You are saying you believe the mother. They can't both be telling the truth [baffled].

I haven't (as I said) seen any of the Facebook stuff.

How can the father prove his isn't abusive? It's impossible to prove a negative. So since the mother has been proved to have broken the law, and has shown herself by her actions to be abusive and manipulative, why would I believe her side of the story over his.

It's not anti-women, or anti-mothers to say this.

And to be fair, The Hague Convention is predominately pro-mothers - it was put in place to stop mostly fathers "stealing" their children. Before Hague, many mothers lost their children to fathers taking them abroad and having the money and status and power in their own countries to keep them there.

No-one should be allowed to blatantly break law as regards the Hague Convention. It puts thousands of other children in danger. So the Australian authorities are working on behalf of those thousands of children, even if the immediate effect is that two children (and it seems to be only two) are temporarily upset. Awful as it may be for those two.

And I still hold this could all have been avoided had the mother got onto a plane with them a year ago (or 2 years ago for that matter).

I refuse to make a judgement on this woman for anything other than the facts

Yet you are happy to pass judgement on the father, with little information. And that information has been given to you by the mother, via the media

For fucks sake - show me WHERE even ONCE have I passed judgment on the father? I haven't. Just because I disagree - stongly - with the way you are currently acting, doesn't make you right.

My PERSONAL OPINION is that the father SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE with the girls on the plane. I have said this more than once. The mother COULD NOT go on the plane with them. They went on the plane with strangers.

The father WAS NOT in the wrong to want his girls home with him. But why did he not think to be there so that they had at least one of their parents with them? That is my only issue with the father - and it isn't a judgement, it was a question that I asked way back up the thread.

I will tell you why the mum is wrong and why I believe the father is not abusive: because abductors always claim abuse (violence, psychological, or sexual). It is standard operating procedure in Hague return case because it is the only defense.

Mum's defense was heard by an Australian judge who based his decision on evidence that included an Australian psych eval of the girls. He concluded the father was not a threat. Which means mum was lying about that too.

And why do I care that Laura Garrett is a lying liar?

Because real domestic violence exists and destroys lives. Statistically, wo,me like Laura Garrett are actually few and far between, and most abuse claims are real. But the lying, manipulating Laura Garretts have a disproportionate impact. They cast doubt on real claims of abuse. And abused women and their children are the ones who suffer.

Laura Garrett is not just a bad mum who hurt her own daughters with her theatrics, she hurt women whose beatings should never be doubted.

because abductors always claim abuse (violence, psychological, or sexual)

Always? Really? What in every case? Every case that you have presided over, every case that you have been a Judge sitting on is that?

I refuse to blindly accept that ANYONE deserves the vitirol that has been shown on this thread

I don't understand why that baffles you? Why is it wrong for me to not want to believe something I do not know is true or not.

Ok, Fuckit, I'm obviously speaking Farsi again. Enjoy yourselves. Personally I don't get any thrills out of slagging off women I don't know. Funnily enough I don't get any thrill out of slagging off men I don't know either - well except Peter Andre, but that's a given.

You know, I wasn't believed either. Because I didn't act in the way I was supposed to act. But that was OK, because when he finally tried to kill me, he did so in front of witnesses. Thank fuck.

I see what LtEve is saying. We can't know what either of these parents is really like and what is truly motivating them, though the mother's actions in taking the children to Australia under false pretences was very wrong.

I suppose the father could have gone to Australia to help get the children back, but maybe could not afford it: he could have spent all that money only to find the girls had been taken into hiding again. How many times could you go over in the hope, only to find they had not actually been located? And there probably wasn't a lot of notice as the police acted as soon as they were found.

The way the children were removed was horrible to see, but I don't feel that it was so awful that any step was reasonable to avoid it, e.g. letting the children stay in Oz. Courts have to be very careful: if it is known they would baulk at a forced removal any parent of abducted children only has to engineer a confrontation to keep their kids. Same as Xenia's delay point, really.

This thread is interesting. No one is really moving from their initial, instinctive positions of pro-mother or pro-father. The same basic facts, the mother's desperate, extreme action is used to argue both that she is selfish, mentally damaged, evil; and that the father must have been abusive, so she is desperate, brave, selfless. The thread shows why these kinds of news stories have such a pull: we invest emotionally, with lots of projecting of our own experiences.

Let's all admit that we don't really know, and although a lot of information seems to be in the public domain, with the exception of reported judgments most of it is unreliable, incomplete and biased.

I don't care about the mother and father, both of them seem to be acting in their own interests rather than the children's.

The children should be asked what they want, they are old enough.

I'm not pro-mother or pro-father, I'm pro-Hague.

And for a law to stand, it has to be enforced. You can't let people break the law and then say "oh, the law has been broken, but it is the status quo now so we'll just leave it".

It makes other people see the law as weak, and so encourages them to break it.

LtEve, I'm really sorry you had such a shite time. And I'm not spurting vitriol at anyone, really I'm not. I just think that in cases like this decisions have to be made which might hurt some people in the short term, but benefit many (even the hurt ones) in the long term.

Hully, they will be, when they get back to Italy.

And it is quite possible the older two will choose to go back to Australia, and if that is the case they will probably be allowed to.

But the younger two - should children at 7 or 8 be allowed to choose which parent to live with, especially if there has been accusations of brainwashing by one of the parents.

I dunno. It's all very sad.

LtEve, yep, in my family's case and all the many cases we became aware of. It's called the grave risk of harm defense under the Hague. Look it up.

There are many cases where a woman has fled a country to save her children real violence, and courts can and should identify these. But the fakers like Garrett have diluted the defense. It's a shame.

Have you got a link to where it was proved that there was no abuse and laura garrett was a faker Redsilk?

Thanks.

Amber, there were court hearings on this back in May and then some of this was covered just two weeks ago.
If you can't find, I will look it up later. A good recent one was a radio report (4bc?) with interviews with lawyers and experts on the case.

You can't prove there is no abuse [baffled]

You can't prove a negative. I haven't seen anywhere that there is any evidence of any abuse apart from the mother's word.

And since she lied about the holiday, lied to the courts about where her children were, and refused to abide by court decisions, she may not be the most reliable witness.

Yeah that's kind of my point MaryZ!

So Redsilk should really stop calling Laura Garrett a faker in that respect.

Amber, LtE, here is a short news video someone sent me a few months ago about a mother who abducted her children to Russia and was caught lying about about virtually everything on camera. I remembered this as a Russia case but in fact the abduction was also from Florence/Italy (and also four children and false accusations of violence).

bringflorentinekidshome.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/english-version-news-program-on-abduction-and-isolation-of-the-children/

Not being one to believe in coincidences, my point is that these situations are not rare at all.

Or maybe it is a coincidence and there is just something in the Italian water.

The law is the law. The Hague Conention must prevail otherwise there will be an international free for all of abuctions. It is there to protect us all as mothers and fathers.

Xenia - The Hague Convention is very simplistic. The law needs to evolve.

The Hague convention just needs to be enforced. If the girls had been returned within the 6 weeks that The Hague mandates, none of this would have been an issue.

It was foot-dragging by the mum and the courts that led to this situation after 26 months!

If posters can't comment without 100% proof that's most of MN ruled out.

Is my DP being unreasonable?
Well, as we don't have the facts and only your word, and no proof, we can't comment.

The Hague Convention has to be simplistic.

The children's future should be decided in the country in which they habitually reside.

Any other law favours the parent who has more money, can shout louder, and has the strength, power and influence to get away with stealing their children.