Forced separation of children from their mother is a common practice in the regions of Northern Caucasus.  It involves taking the children away from their mother in case of parental separation or the father’s death.  This practice can take the form of abduction of children by their father or his relatives as well as non-compliance of the family court rulings directing that children must remain with their mother or see her on regular basis.  The forced separation usually involves complete denial of opportunities to stay in touch: the mother is not allowed to see her children and the children are pressured into refusing to see her or punished for attempts at such contact. 

According the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child the right to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents is inalienable and must be provided for by State Parties.  Parental abduction is both a domestic and an international problem and many international organizations cooperate to ensure the reunification of parents and children.  At the same time, in Russia, executive and judicial authorities, having adjudicated the custody to one parent, are unable to enforce the non-custodial parent’s right to see his or her children and participate in their upbringing. 

In the Northern Caucasus regions this is further compounded by the fact that traditional norms and customs hold that the child is the property of their father’s clan and the father usually gets custody after divorce/separation.  Even the courts factor “regional traditions” into their decisionmaking.  Along with honor killings, FGM and forced marriages, forced separation from children is a region-specific problem in the Northern Caucasus.  It is essentially another form of gender discrimination in which the local society, government and religious institutions are complicit. 
The effectiveness of Russian law and law enforcement in the sphere of family abduction, not so high across the country, is even lower in this region.  This is proven through human rights and investigative reporting, as well academic articles by lawyers and law enforcement professionals. 
The project (Insert title) has been hard at work since 2020 to help women who found themselves in a situation of forced separation from their children in the Northern Caucasus region, at studying and raising awareness of this issue.  That involved finding specialists (lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists to testify as expert witnesses), creating peer support groups for mothers online and compiling information materals (see Action Plan for Mothers Whose Children Are Victims of Parental Abduction, insert link)
We also raised awareness through the media, publishing specific stories in hopes that this will increase the likelihood of the specific woman’s problem getting resolved (see links).  The educational campaing continued with filming of a documentary Punished for Motherhood (insert link).  

The project also conducted a study “Caucasus Motherless” where the forced separation phenomenon was investigated as a part of the fabric of lives of North Caucasus women denied contact with their children.  With that end in mind we conducted semi-structured interviews with women in Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.  

The goal of the study was to place forced maternal separations under a microscope, make this problem visible and shine a light on where it fits in the larger system.  We strove to describe the situation of separation and its consequences for mothers and children, the actions women take to regain custody or visitation and the difficulties they encounter, to reflect on the insufficiency of the current legal tools available.  The goals and objectives of the study were based on the need to collect data about the nature of the problem so that the description can stimulate public discussion, recognition of the problem and mark the beginning of discussion of strategies and steps to solve it.

  
The study showed that the practice of forced maternal separation leads to nothing but negative consequences for the children’s health and development.  Very often the children are labeled as “belonging to the father’s clan”, but in reality no-one wants to care for them as much as their mother does.  After the separation the father transfers caregiving responsibilities to other adults (grandparents, aunts, stepmothers), who may or may not have the desire or resources to care of the child.  Children are separated from their mother physically and psychologically, live in a situation of threats and pressure for attempts at contact, and grow up in an environment where their mother is portrayed as the ultimate villain.  The women themselves, many of whom are victims of domestic violence, the fight to see their children is connected to further danger and places them in a situations where the very institutions charged with protecting them (relatives, elders, Islamic courts, the secular courts, the police) fail them or antagonize them.  The most effective (though dangerous at initial stages) strategy proved to be a combination of media and online exposure, peer support on social networks and pro bono help from NGO volunteer specialists.  What remains of these women’s lives is forever overshadowed by the forced separation.  The majority of them cannot or do not wish to remarry, having been traumatized and ostracized by the public opinion. 
As noted above, it is the state’s duty to enable the child to realize his or her right to maintain familial ties. In order to solve the problem of forced separation of children from the their mothers in the Northern Caucasus region most effectively, the following recommendations were developed:  

 

Legal:

First and foremost it is necessary to pass a comprehensive law criminalizing domestic violence with a protective order provision.  That would allow victims of domestic violence to seek safety from the aggressor via courts and police.  

It is necessary to ensure compliance with decisions of secular courts.  It is necessary to raise the level of criminal responsibility for non-compliance with custody and visitation orders and prosecute this non-compliance as criminal, rather than an administrative violation.  

It is necessary that in the event a child-abduction case becomes inter-regional (the abductor removes the child to a different region inside the Russian Federation), the case is removed to the appropriate department of the Federal Bailiff Service.  

It is necessary to integrate into international child abduction prevention and victim support programs.  

 

Law enforcement:

Courts and other agencies outside the Caucasus need to stop making allowance for “ethnic peculiarities” when reviewing Caucasus cases because that leads to denying mothers their parental rights.  

In order to achieve this outcome, it is necessary to conduct training for child welfare professionals, court personnel and bailiffs.  This training would familiarize them with the psychological state of child survivors of parental abduction or forced separation.  It will enable the professionals to have a better understanding of why the child “doesn’t want to see” their mother and withdraws from her upon contact.   

In addition, based on our findings, the following recommendations were developed for women themselves:

Proactively prevent abduction whenever possible.  Do not surrender the child voluntarily.  Run away and seek help.  If possible, remove the child to a country where parental rights are respected.  

Appeal to human rights organizations that fight against domestic violence and for women’s rights. 

Become involved in female-only peer support groups

Be visible: try, whenever possible, to get social networks and media exposure.  Describe your struggle online.  

Study guides and instructions from human rights organizations developed specifically for women who were forcibly separated from their children.  

Summarized study is below.  The complete version can be found here (insert link).  

 

Summary of findings

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The women involved in this study are a diverse group.  They are aged from 18 to 50 and come from different ethnic groups: 21 Chechen, 10 Ingush, 8 Dagestani, three Russians, one each Bashkir, Kabardinian and Mari.  These women are not initially marginalized.  22 of 45 have a college degree and another 17 have a trade school degree.  The vast majority (38 of 45) grew up with both parents.  The four raised by a single mother were not separated from her.  Only three grew up in the same circumstances as their children – they were raised by grandparents and other relatives or my their father and stepmother.  With such positive childhood experience the majority (28 of 45) did not even entertain the thought that someone could take away their children post-divorce.  Many (7 of 45) knew that such a custom existed, but never expected it from their husbands and thought they had the situation under control.  About a quarter of the respondents (10) were prepared for the possibility that it may happen to them.   
The common factor with all these women is that after they got married (10 participants before they turned eighteen) and then divorced, their children were taken away from them.  The length of the marriage had no bearing on the forced separation.  The median length of marriage pre-separation is eight years, but the range is from two months to 26 years. 
Marriage customs vary slightly by region and ethnicity.  In Dagestan marriages between cousins are common, which exacerbates the situation in case of forced separation, since the spouses come from the same family and the extended family supports the children’s father.  The previously mentioned early marriages also contribute since some of the mothers were married off as teenagers, against their will and did not have awareness that they have rights or life experience they could lean on.   

As a result out of 111 children of these 45 mothers, 90 children are separated from their mothers.  In the case of 12 mothers some children were not taken away or were promptly returned and some were permanently separated.  Most women have  two (15 participants) or three (12 participants) children.  The average number of children per woman in this study is 2.5 children while the number of separated children is two per woman. That means that in many cases even if the mother managed to reunite with one of her children, she did not reunite with another.  

 

The child’s age has little bearing on the probability of forced separation.  Babies under six months (six out of 92) and teenagers over fifteen (only two) are slightly less likely to be victims of forced separation.  Children between two and four are separated slightly more often (19 children altogether).  The average age for forced separation is six years old, the median one is five years old.  It’s an age where the child requires a little less attention, is a little more aware of his surroundings and at the same time it’s an age where the child’s behavior can be modified by threats and pressure.  For example a preschooler and beyond can be conditioned to tell his mother to go away and to say the right things to child welfare workers. 
The participants are (or were in the event they managed to regain physical custody) separated from their child or children for a duration of one month to sixteen years.  The average time length of separation is 4.1 years.  The most frequent duration of separation is one to four years and in almost half of the cases (21 women) the respondents have not seen their children for that period of time.   

 

Separation from children frequently happens within the framework of family violence.  The majority of participants (31 out of 45) recounted that they suffered physical violence from their husbands while married.  Sometimes a woman so disenfranchised that the separation from the children also means a loss of a place to live.  The husband or his family simply kick the woman out of the home.  That happened with half the respondents (18 cases).  In seven cases the husband did it just because, in six cases he did because he wished to take another wife and in the remaining cases the woman was kicked out of the house by her husband’s relatives. 
In the event children don’t remain in the father’s home and the mother manages to take them along, the children are removed from the mother at a later time.  This is accomplished either by not returning them after family visits, vacation, etc. (20 cases) or forcibly abducting them (10 cases).  In some instances (10 cases) the mother is pressured into surrendering the children by the society around her (family, village elders, Muslim clerics).   In rare instances the court awards the custody to the father (4 cases) and the police removes the children to the father’s home (1 case) and in those cases the decisions are based not to Russian family law, but on regional traditions that define the children as the property of their father’s clan.   

 

This motive (children belong to their father’s clan) is the leading one for the decision to forcibly separate the children from their mother.  In a third of cases (14) this is the motive cited.  The children’s emotional health and welfare are not important compared to their father’s clan’s standing in the community and that standing is largely tied to compliance with traditions.  The second motive appears to be classic family violence.  It is cited as the primary one in twelve cases.  The children are used to settle scores, to cause pain, to show the ex-wife “her place”.  Sometimes the father is instigated by his relatives, usually female (mother, sisters, aunts) who have an ax to grind with the children’s mother.  This occurred in seven cases.    
Also, the father acquiring a new wife is an important factor in forced separations.  In ten cases the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the father had a mistress or wished to bring home a second wife (which is allowed in Islam and condoned by local traditions) and the mother of the children did not like this arrangement one bit.  The potential stepmother is usually not told that the duty to raise these children would be foisted upon her and doesn’t exactly welcome those responsibilities.  Thus this woman becomes the next link in the chain of disenfranchisement and family violence. 
Financial motives and economic abuse also occur.  In six cases the mother was pressured into giving up her parental rights so that the father gains access to the child’s government benefits or the father attempted to evict the mother from her own property. 
The cases exist where the desire to enrich oneself trumps religious norms and customs.  According to the Sharia law, in the event of a man’s death his family must support his widow and her minor children.  In reality the dead man’s family often kicks the widow out of her family home and abducts her children.  In essence, religious decrees are only enforced when they benefit the father (“the child stays with the father’s clan after the divorce”) and are ignored when they would have benefited the mother (“children under seven belong to their mother” “the dead man’s family must care for his widow and his children”)
In a situation of forced separation of children from their mother it quickly becomes apparent that the father has no interest in actually raising these children.  Only in two cases these children were being in classic “single father” model. The circumstances in which these children are raised are far from comfortable.  In the majority of cases the children are raised by their grandparents and aunts (17 cases), a father+stepmother combination (14 cases) and in 8 cases these children were raised by a stepmother alone, i.e. a unrelated adult.   Often this responsibility is too much for the grandparents because of their age or unwelcome by stepmothers and aunts. 
The mothers do everything in their power to maintain connection to the children from whom they were separated.  They try to reason with the father and his family, wait by the schools, and do their best to call and to write messages.  Two thirds of the women (26 of 45) began the struggle to reunite with their children immediately after the separation.  But more than half of the participants (24 of 45) are denied the opportunity to see their children and a third (14 cases) can see them only on rare occasions.  At the same time two thirds of the mothers (31 of 45) get at least partial updates on their children, while a third (14 of 45) are kept completely in the dark.  Only one sixth of the mothers in the sample (7 women) can see their children on a regular basis. 
The fight for the opportunity to see one’s children usually subjects the women to threats and pressure – only 6 of 45 did not encounter that. The children themselves are subjected to threats and pressure.  Two thirds of the mothers (32 of 45) report this.  Seven more mothers say that their children are too young.  This hostile environment, punishments and labeling the mother as an “unworthy woman” who abandoned her children all contribute to a climate where only a quarter of the mothers (13 of 45) report that their children are willing and available for contact.  In the rest of the cases the children refuse all contact with the mother or are physically unavailable.   

 

The children’s physical and emotional health deteriorates as a result of separation and their welfare is under threat.  Of the 32 mothers who know what’s going on with their children, 31 report changes for the worse.  The children’s health may have deteriorate because of neglect.  Their development may slow down or regress and the trauma of separation can manifest itself through aggression or apathy and withdrawal.  

 

In  the struggle to reunite with their children many women begin with appealing to traditional institutions (the elders, the Islamic clerics) and only if that does not work, they appeal to the secular government institutions (courts, police, child welfare agencies).  Here we have observed that without exposure in the media and online these appeals are generally not effective.  The elders usually side with the father and the acquisition of children by his clan – only 5 out 27 appeals resulted in the children being reunited with their mother.  Even when a secular court finds for the mother in a custody dispute or rules the child’s removal unlawful, these decisions are rarely enforced – 21 out of 27 cases were decided for the mother, but only in six the children were actually returned to the mother.  The bailiffs seem largely incapable of enforcing these orders.  In the majority of successful reunifications (14 of 19 cases) media exposure and the following public outcry were a crucial factor. 
The woman’s own family offers at best partial support with mixed results.  More than half of the participants (23 of 45) said the only a part of the family supported them in their quest to reunite with the children (for example, mother or sister supported while father or brother opposed).  That lead to the women feeling betrayed by their relatives (21 out of 45 respondents) and many are not prepared to forgive them. 21 women report receiving support from friends and fellow survivors online, as well as volunteer professionals in NGO’s.  Ten women report that they have not received support from anyone.  

 

It is clear that the forced separation from the children has a defining influence on these women, on their state of mind and vision of their future lives.  Two thirds of the women do not plan to remarry or have more children, because their lives revolve around attempts to regain contact with children from the first marriage.  Of those who remarried (often due to pressure from their families), almost half later divorced. 

Thus we see that forced separation has a crushing effect on both mothers and children, compromising their welfare and thwarting the progress of their lives.  

 

Observations

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The cases exist where the desire to enrich oneself trumps religious norms and customs.  According to the Sharia law, in the event of a man’s death his family must support his widow and her minor children.  In reality the dead man’s family often kicks the widow out of her family home and abducts her children.  In essence, religious decrees are only enforced when they benefit the father (“the child stays with the father’s clan after the divorce”) and are ignored when they would have benefited the mother (“children under seven belong to their mother” “the dead man’s family must care for his widow and his children”)

Thus, in the framework of this study we observe that in case of forced separation of mothers and children, traditions and community opinion work to benefit one side only, cementing discrimination of low-resource groups (women and children), ignoring their rights and interests, and leaning on religious traditions only to the extent it helps maintain the status quo.  The humanist impetus of Islamic religious norms is thus negated by the discriminatory practices on the ground.