Woman jailed for abducting her own children

Friday 09 March 2018

A woman has been jailed for five months for taking her children away from Guernsey, without the prior consent of their father.

The woman took the two children, then aged six and four to Holland, where she had planned to start a new life with a man who she had met via the internet.

The woman, who can't be named for legal reasons, shared joint custody of her two children with their father after the break down of their marriage in 2015.

Shortly after that, she started a relationship with a Dutch national who she met online.

The father of the children cared for them over the weekend of 2 and 3 September 2016, and on returning the children was greeted in the drive by their mother where she claimed a conversation occurred where she told him her plans to leave the island. The court determined that his further actions proved he had no idea she was planning to take the children away from the island, and had not given the mother permission to do so.

On 4 September the mother travelled off island with the two children and the father said he was unaware of this until a phone call from the Dutch national on 5 September saying "we are all together in Holland and we are going to spend a new life together."

The father immediately started criminal proceedings and got a court order from The Hague ordering the children to be returned to Guernsey. The children were finally returned to the island on 27 October 2016.

The court heard how the father had to go to great lengths to have the children returned, and he has spent almost £12,000 to ensure this happened.

The children's mother stayed in Holland for a further three months claiming she would have returned sooner but had had a nervous breakdown and financial difficulties.

On her arrival back in Guernsey on 23 January the woman was taken into custody, where she had remained ever since until her court appearance yesterday.

In returning a verdict, the magistrate said that the best interests of the children was paramount and that their mother had caused a large amount of stress to the children's father and as a result of her actions he had also been impacted financially.

Judge McKerrell said that whatever the mother had thought, he was confident the father had no inkling that she was going to remove the children from Guernsey and that the father went to considerable lengths to get them back. He told the woman that she had no right to do what she did and that this needed to be punished on the facts, so as to discourage others from such actions.

The woman was sent to jail for five months, with the sentence backdated to 23 January 2018, which was the date she was first taken into custody.