It has been eight years since Anita Gera last saw her children. Her daughter is now 16, her son 18.
‘He’s now legally an adult,’ she reflects soberly. ‘He’s just finished high school. His graduation was last week. So I have missed his entire childhood since the age of nine. The last birthday I spent with him was his ninth.’
Anita, 59, has been unable to see her children since August 3, 2015, after their father filed a Hague Convention claim against her.
Anita’s life was forever and irrevocably changed by a single piece of legislature most people have never heard of. For nearly a decade, she has dedicated her life to learning the law and raising awareness to end the broken cycle.
Anita met her former partner, an American entrepreneur living in Europe, while she was working in Germany as a journalist. They settled and had children, whose identity she wishes to protect, before deciding to leave Europe in 2007 and begin a new life together in America while the children were still young.
She says that there were signs of abuse before reaching the States, but within of weeks of relocation her situation was more clear. She alleges her partner became ‘controlling’ and short-tempered, telling her explicitly that she would never see her children again if she left or went against him.
The abuse took a physical form, Anita claims. Her partner would push her, grab her hard enough to leave bruises, and would raise his fist. Anita’s partner did not hit her, she maintains, and ‘abuse’ or ‘coercive control’ were not words explored at the time.
Her children were afraid of their father, she says, and knew to behave in a certain way around him, staying quiet and not having friends over.
Anita waited another six years before her partner allowed her to move to England with her children, away from him.
‘My ex-husband said to me: “Tell everyone we’re separated so you can claim benefits” because he never gave us any money to support us. Rent a house? Yes. Put the kids in school? Yes. I’ve got emails saying all of that.
‘But then,’ she says, ‘he changed his mind. “Right, come home now.”‘
When Anita wanted to allow her children to complete the school term, if not the school year, her millionaire ex went through the courts, invoking the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, an international treaty used to determine which jurisdiction the children are ‘habitually resident’ in.
Anita has also worked with the Hague Mothers, a group labelling the Convention a ‘good law gone bad’ that works with experts to ‘put right the injustices perpetuated by the Convention’.