Andrew had been out organising his Christmas wedding when he came home to discover that his world had collapsed. His partner had left for Germany and taken their four-month-old son with her. He has not seen the child since that day in August and now faces a traumatic court battle for the right to have access to him.

Dawn hasn’t seen her daughter, 7, since April. Her husband had taken the girl on holiday to his home country, Algeria; he phoned her on the day that he was due to return and said they were not coming back. Then there’s Chris, who is fighting to have his kids returned from Sweden, where they are living with their mother, and Clare, whose nine-year-old son was taken by his British father on “holiday” to Portugal. The pair later went, without her permission, to Morocco and have been gone 11 months.

All these stories appear on the Parents Forum of Reunite, the leading UK charity specialising in international parental child abduction that next week will hold its annual Balloon Launch in Leicester to highlight this growing problem. A more anguished chronicle of mass parental despair you would struggle to find.

Abduction seems a strong word to use when a child is taken by a parent, but internationally it is recognised as the legal term – and the incidence of such cases is increasingly dramatically. Since 1995, the number of children abducted from Britain and taken to another country has risen by 93 per cent. During 2006, Reunite recorded a total of 270 new abduction cases, involving 414 children; in the first half of 2007 there was a 22 per cent increase on the same period last year.

As travel becomes easier and cheaper, as employees move around the world with multinational companies, the number of international marriages – and divorces – grows. The influx of Polish workers coming to work in Britain has also helped to fuel the number of abduction cases here. When one partner wants to return home to Poland and takes the children, the matter often ends up before a judge. The highest level of child abduction/return is between the US and Ireland, because of the number of marriages between Irish and American people. The problem is so pronounced that the two countries have a child abduction pact.

In a case earlier this month the mother of two boys aged 11 and 16 lost her Court of Appeal fight to have them returned to her in France after they refused to leave their father’s home in London. Their French mother had taken them to her homeland in 2005 after her marriage to their British father broke down. But the boys failed to settle there and so impressed three appeal judges with the strength of their desire to live in Britain that, in a highly unusual move, Lord Justice Thorpe said that this must override the wishes of their mother.

Jane Keir, the head of the family law team at Kingsley Napley, says that, nine and-a-half times out of ten, children in that position would have been returned by the judges, but that sometimes, if a child has maturity and intelligence and expresses his or her wishes convincingly, that will carry more weight. “There are no hard-and-fast rules,” she says. “If an 11-year-old is mature and knows his or her own mind, what he or she says might carry more weight than, say, a 13 year-old who is perhaps less mature.” Britain, she says, is generally very good about returning children to countries from which they have been abducted. Unfortunately, this is not always reciprocated.

Denise Carter, Reunite’s director, says that anyone who applies for the return of a child in Britain automatically receives legal aid so long as the application is accepted. But if a British person was applying to, say, the US to have a child returned, there is no legal aid, the parent must look for a pro bono lawyer, and contend with both federal and state laws. In Spain and France an applicant is entitled to a state lawyer from the Ministry of Justice, but there is no guarantee of his or her expertise in this field.

Parents seeking the return of their children are dependent on the host country obeying the rules on child abduction laid down by the 1980 Hague Convention. The good news is that more than 75 countries, including the UK, have now signed up to it, but Carter says that it is important that those countries take their responsibilities seriously and ensure that their judges and lawyers are appropriately trained and that the courts can cope with the speed of the process (the aim is to deal with such cases within six weeks, but this is not always achieved).

“There is so much more opportunity now for people to form relationships with someone in another country,” says Carter. “Look at a country like Dubai: 20 years ago hardly anybody [from Britain] went there; now you can go for a quick holiday break. It is so much cheaper to travel.”

She says that many of the Spanish cases she is dealing with involve two British nationals. Couples who decide to build a new life as expats in Spain often find that it doesn’t work out, but when one parent wants to come home and the other doesn’t there is an issue about where the children live.

If a child is moved to a country that is not a signatory to the Hague Convention, a parent must travel to that country to begin proceedings for the child’s return in that jurisdiction – a process which is time-consuming and expensive. Some 40 per cent of Reunite’s cases involve countries that are not signatories to the convention, including Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and some in the Middle East. But Britain has an agreed judicial protocol with Pakistan that was in evidence last year when 12-year-old Molly Campbell (Misbah Rana) fled her mother’s home in Scotland and went to live with her father in Lahore. In that instance, despite her mother’s distress, the girl’s wish to live with her father was granted, and she has now built a new life for herself in Pakistan. Egypt, too, has recently entered into a pact with Britain under which each country will recognise the other’s court orders.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office set up a Child Abduction Unit (CAU) in 2004 to deal with the problem. A spokeswoman says that the number of children abducted into England and Wales last year was 191, compared with 121 in 2002. The number abducted out of England and Wales was 153 last year, compared to 113 in 2002. But these figures apply only to abductions to or from countries that have signed up to the Hague Convention and that have been reported to the CAU. There are many more – possibly as many as 4,000 a year – involving other countries, or which have not been officially reported by families.

While the situation is improving globally, some cases are never satisfactorily resolved. One of the most famous is that of Lady Catherine Meyer, whose sons Alexander and Constantin, then 7 and 9, went to spend summer with their father in Germany in 1994 and were never returned, in defiance of a court order. Despite a protracted legal fight and support from politicians in Europe and the US, she saw her boys for only 24 hours in ten years. Now she is in regular contact with them, but only because they are adults and want to see her. The trauma she suffered, outlined in a book, prompted her to set up Parents and Abducted Children Together (Pact), which is dedicated to opposing the abduction of children across international borders and helping the police to retrieve missing children.

Germany has a poor reputation for returning children. In 2001 a group of divorced parents from the US, South Africa, Germany and France staged a hunger strike in Berlin to demand access to their children and accused the German legal system of bias against foreign parents and of ignoring international treaties. But reforms have been implemented and experts say the situation is improving.

Lady Meyer has written about her pain: “Child abduction is a parent’s worst nightmare. Losing a child for a few minutes on an outing is frightening enough; imagine returning home, where all your children’s possessions remain, but they are gone. Your world collapses. The pain is joined by panic. Emotionally traumatised, parents have to cope with daunting obstacles: finding help, dealing with unfamiliar legal systems, bearing the financial costs of pursuing justice. And they are often misunderstood. Instead of sympathy, they are often faced with disbelieving questions. And the pain never goes away, because the wound cannot be healed.”

Her advice is that parents should not lose hope: “Long term, a child will always want to know both his mother and his father.”

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