Every year, some South African women living overseas become trapped in a cycle of violence: unable to leave abusive partners and return home with their children due to the provisions of the Hague Convention. There are well-meaning international treaties whose names develop unintended but chilling connotations. Among certain circles of foreign women trying to leave abusive relationships with their children, the Hague Convention has become one of them.
It has even acquired a verb. To be “Hagued” is to be caught by the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction: a treaty adopted in 1980 to prevent children being unlawfully removed across borders, but which critics say is now routinely weaponised by abusive partners to prevent women and children from escaping violence. “It has become a fearful term among women in foreign countries who cannot leave with their children for fear of vengeful partners,” says Katherine, a South African woman whose daughter and granddaughter are trapped in South Korea.
“If people understood that it means that South African citizens can’t come home … that to me is just completely horrifying.” “Under The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction 1980, a child is considered abducted if they are taken across international borders by one parent without the other parent’s consent,” explainsthe website of Hague Mothers, a lobby group formed by women who say they have been harmed by the treaty. The Hague Convention sprang out of a very particular historical period where Western diplomats, in particular, were responding to social anxieties around rising divorce rates and the fear of paternal child abduction. The convention was drafted at a moment when “there was a consensus, supported by limited data, that fathers who had lost custody of their children were kidnapping them and hiding them abroad, leaving mothers with no means of redress”, according to an investigation published in June 2025 by theNGO The 19th. Forty-five years later, the gendered reality looks very different.
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