Recognised internationally as an expert on the Hague Convention and International Parental Child Abduction, Jacqueline has lectured at the US State Department and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as the European Union and the Hong Kong Family Law Association. Awarded the United Nations Special Commendation for the International Year of the Family, and two recognition awards from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, USA, Jacqueline has been a high-profile international lobbyist on human rights and refugee issues. In recognition of her humanitarian work, Jacqueline was appointed to a new role as a patron of CARE International in January 2007.

Jacqueline is the author of the bestselling Once I Was a Princess. She has four children, and now resides in Melbourne, where she is concentrating on her writing.

Even before I could pinpoint its location, I recognised the cry as the timeless sound of great loss and grief. I knew its origins well; I was familiar with its resonance and acquainted with its depth. In my past, I had, myself, been the originator of many such cries. It was a call to which there was no answer and no panacea – nor did it expect one. Its vibrations spread to my temples and the back of my skull, finally settling as a great, unyielding lump in the back of my throat. As I stumbled across the rock-strewn terrain of the refugee camp, I thought how strange, and yet somehow comforting, that the sounds of tragedy do not differ from one section of humanity to another.

High-pitched screams now punctuated the wails of grief, competing with the dull ‘thump, thump’ emitted by the rotors of a passing armoured helicopter. The chopper, probably carrying missiles, a reconnaissance team, or some other NATO cargo, was visible only as a blackened presence against the night sky. This tract of land over which it passed was wedged between the battle zone of Kosovo and the bright lights of the Macedonian capital, Skopje, 30 kilometres down the unlit road. Our small sanctuary, just 11 minutes within the Macedonian border, provided a meagre haven for 27,000 displaced souls — women, children and men who had fled the armed conflict of Kosovo and the relentless pursuit of the Serbian military forces.

Stenkovec II was one of the three major processing and refugee camps in Macedonia set up under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and run on a day-to-day basis by CARE International, the global humanitarian aid and development agency. The camp was bleak and unforgiving, occupying a series of high-walled rabbit-warren gullies, interconnected by excavated cuttings just wide enough for a tank to pass through. A small hill at its core provided a vantage point, up which children scrambled during the daylight hours, and where an effort had been made by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to cobble together the semblance of a school and kindergarten. Formerly a stone quarry that had served, until recently, as a heavy artillery and weapons range, the locale was devoid of trees, running water, electricity and sewerage.

The moon reflected off the battered face of my Swatch watch – 3.27 a.m. We had been processing and unloading these latest busloads of refugees (or ‘Internally Displaced People’, as the politically correct amongst us insisted on saying) since just after 1 a.m. The initial headcounts reckoned about 800 souls had been crammed aboard six buses, each normally intended to carry fifty-five passengers.

Closing in on the weeping, I picked my way around the rear of the huge khaki-coloured ‘horse tents’ – so named, I assumed, because the military arm who had donated them to the relief effort was a cavalry regiment. It was here that our new arrivals were to be sheltered. Each human being would be allotted a one-metre-wide space which would have to serve as sleeping quarters, living room and storage for whatever possessions they had managed to carry on their back, or shove into plastic shopping bags as they began their escape to safety. A requisite two metres separating the rows served as a central walkway between the two sides of a tent. These were the minimum allowances under World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNHCR guidelines during a time of emergency. This was the theory; but in practice, nearly one hundred weary people would that night sleep in a tent meant to accommodate thirty, cheek by jowl with complete strangers in utter darkness. This was just one of the frustrating realities we faced as aid workers: we witnessed humanity at its lowest ebb forced to masquerade as sardines.

I checked each canvas, trying to pinpoint the location of the grieving woman. The miner’s lamp on my head bounced light off startled faces peering back at me from the darkness. There was quiet sobbing in every shelter I visited, whispering, groaning and sometimes the whimpering of babies and children, but the sound I sought was on a different level – it had a different intensity. Tangles of guy ropes and tent pegs running off our makeshift town hampered my path; I tripped and broke my fall by making a grab for the cyclone wire perimeter fence, and that is how I found her.

My torch illuminated her feet, shod in battered tan high-heeled shoes. Knees drawn tightly up to her chest, she sat on the ground oblivious to my approach. Her brown gabardine skirt was heavily stained, that much I could see, and she now emitted guttural howls as she repeatedly banged her forehead with the heel of her hand. To witness such grief, and then to be capable of identifying it from the outside looking in, is an unspeakable invasion of person. Even now as I write, my chest compresses hard against my lungs and my eyes are drawn out of their sockets by the insight it affords.

Her brown hair was short and streaked with blonde, her hands and nails grubby and torn. The blouse she wore had once been white – a teacher’s or secretary’s garb, I guessed – but marred now by a few missing buttons and what appeared to be dried blood. Thirty-plus, I estimated, around my own age – young enough, yet ancient, too, if life has imploded all normality.

Grasping her pounding fist, I dragged it downwards as she threw back her head. Her jaw slackened with a huge expulsion of air and wailing from the back of her throat. Another woman emerged from the shadows, a grandmother, judging from the little girl clutching at her long cardigan. She spoke to me in Albanian, a tumble of words I couldn’t understand. I tried a few words in Bosnian and there was a flicker of comprehension. The grandmother called to a teenage boy who had hung back against the tent wall.

Selma was the distressed woman’s name, according to the boy, translating the grandmother’s words. Two days earlier, at a pre-border check by the Serbian paramilitary, she had been subjected to a body cavity search. The soldiers had found a roll of cash secreted on her person. Her punishment for attempting to smuggle cash out of Kosovo was the murder of her child.

Apparently, she was on her knees as she struggled to stop the thugs from tearing her seven-year-old son from her arms. One military type grabbed her by the hair while another wrenched the small child’s arms above his head, put a pistol to the base of his skull and pulled the trigger.

‘His eyes, his eyes,’ was what I now understood Selma sobbed as I held her tightly in my arms, her head against my shoulder. The last image of her terrorised child had seared itself into her mind with the efficiency of a precision laser and marked her as a mother shattered by its final brutality.

It was then, for the first and only time ever, that I broke the cardinal rule of aid work – never cry in front of your charges. Fuck that; I was crying with her not for her, and some of my tears were for the awfulness of our fellow human beings and the deeds of which they were capable.

But the straight truth of the matter is that nothing surprises me much any more. A stiff vodka on ice sipped decorously in the private bar at the House of Lords and a muddy cup of coffee imbibed squatting beside the casings of depleted uranium armaments aren’t that different in terms of good conversation or company; and, besides, I now just accept the vagaries of life as a natural progression towards some distant point in the future. Years ago I had to make a choice: to either shut down my faculties, my heartbeat, my potential for joy and wallow in unassuageable grief and torment, or decide I would survive and create a new life for myself by harnessing all my negative experiences into one positive and stubborn force and following the direction in which it led me. That was the single most important decision I have made since I was a princess.

I lay still and quiet in my bed, watching the occasional light from a helicopter gunship float past my window, as I waited for dawn to release me from my unwelcome thoughts. I contemplated how the years following a tragedy can pass in the blink of an eye or with the protracted and torturous ache of an unhealed and suppurating amputation. It depends entirely on the mindset of the person counting the minutes. For me, that experience of time passed through both dimensions depending on my relationships, surroundings and activities. Losing both my children had devastated and galvanised me on the most unpredictable levels of pain and survival. For me, I came to understand that the human mind remembers moments or days, but the overriding psychological imprint is that of emotions and milestones – missed and shredded.

Decisions I had made as a seventeen year old, when I was swept off my feet by a seemingly mild-mannered foreign architecture student who had attended Prince Charles’s alma mater, Geelong Grammar, left me and my children dealing with the consequences of my wilfulness decades later.

The quiet young man I had met and fallen in love with was the cliched tall, dark and handsome gallant; he also turned out to be the grandson of the late Sultan of Terengganu and a royal Prince in his own right. I see now why Bahrin was attracted to me – he had been married (and divorced) once already to a fellow student of the same age who had left him for an Aussie gardener. In me, as a fairly damaged teenager from a dysfunctional home who just wanted a family to love, he had found a girl he could mould into the sort of Princess he wanted. Fresh enough in terms of genealogy, parentless in terms of interference, and always an outsider in Australia because of my mixed racial background (Australian born of French, Irish, English and Chinese decent) in a then xenophobic country, I longed to fit in and that is what he offered – complete acceptance under Islam and a firm place in his family.

We settled down to a strange married life within Bahrin’s family, a branch of the Malaysian royals in Terengganu – quite a wealthy state where the royals benefited from its gas, oil and mining reserves, as well as the logging of rainforest timbers. I was a breeder and he took a punt that my bloodlines would enhance his. Our ten-year age difference seemed inconsequential at the time of our union, but like many hopeful fairy tales, the gilt wore off the marriage fairly quickly when our cultural differences became apparent. I objected to his philandering and physical poundings and he disliked my objections. The other problem was that once I became a mother, even though I was a teenager, my malleability dissolved and I grew a brain – a very Westernised brain – which provoked my husband’s blue blood to the point of boiling.

My erstwhile Prince became increasingly abusive towards me, but the straw that broke this camel’s back was his polygamous marriage to a scantily clad nightclub singer a couple of weeks after the birth of our youngest child. Subsequently, the children and I returned to my home town of Melbourne.

Following a protracted legal battle in the Australian Family Court regarding the correct forum for a hearing (the Prince had wanted me deported from my own birthplace to stand before an Islamic Syriah Court in Malaysia), Bahrin voluntarily signed over full custody of our children to me, allowing me to forge a new life with my children in Australia.

Contrary to various media reports at the time, the Prince was not hard done by legally or emotionally and had liberal, although conditional, access to our little ones.

Iddin and Shahirah lived in Australia with me from the ages of two years and five months, respectively. We were happy and self-contained, a marked contrast to my turbulent life in a royal Islamic household. I worked in the early years following our divorce as a waitress, typist, ballet teacher and later a public relations consultant, always juggling childcare and income, with the priority being the children and our time together. Money was tight, but the children and I lived happily in a rambling old house I renovated with my own hands.

There was what I can only describe as a lightness in my children’s existence then – they were shiny and joyous and giggling. I remember climbing the old apricot tree in the garden with them and dangling from its branches, and teddy bear picnics in the park. I suppose, at that time, we were growing up together, as I was a single mother at the age of twenty-two. There were raucous afternoons spent quite literally rolling in the mud and snorkelling in the bathtub and making cereal boxes into hats and spaceships. But most of all, we were together, and however modest my income, my children were never hungry and never dirty and there was always plenty of love and cuddles. I think that is what, even after all the years of separation from Iddin and Shah, I missed the most – the cuddles; the heart-wrenching and primal instinct to softly sniff your child’s scent as they snuggle in, and the knowledge that the heartbeats you can faintly feel as they press against you first began in your own body.

Iddin and Shahirah were seven and five when I remarried in 1990 – five years after leaving their father. Iain Gillespie was light and laughter compared to my past, the quintessential Pied Piper/Peter Pan I had missed in my childhood. He came as a package deal with teenage children and worked as a documentary film-maker and journalist. Our children fell in love with each other and we lived a happy, busy suburban life in a leafy Melbourne suburb. Bike rides, weekends at Iain’s family farm, loud dinner parties and a frenzy of domestic activity – what more could anyone expect with five children often residing in the house together and the occasional foster child or sleepover. Perhaps we were too bright and smug in our domesticity, for when the guillotine of abduction came hurtling down, the heart of our family was cut out with the removal of our two youngest members.

I can remember the great gaping maw of emptiness and shock, the point where emotional pain and physical stress collide and all your body can do is retch uncontrollably and shake with spasms of open-ended grief and longing. All this was played out for months in the full glare of the media and with all the drama of a television crime show, for the cachet of royalty and my role on television and radio as a reporter and broadcaster were like fresh blood to a school of sharks. It caused a feeding frenzy as I agitated every angle that could be found in the hope of first locating my children on Australian territory and later, causing enough of a political furore to make the government do something to retrieve Shah and Iddin from Malaysia. My children were dual nationals at the time of their abduction. Both children held Australian and Malaysian citizenship, having been born in Terengganu and registered by my husband and me with the Australian diplomatic mission as Australian citizens.

I oversaw petitions, pressed for parliamentary questions, lobbied opposition members, made midnight phone calls to union leaders and former prime ministers, who either behaved like arseholes when asked for assistance, or took my calls late into the night and offered wise counsel. And always the newspapers and other media, ever present and later perverse as they chased the new angle, then decided I was too boring and turned against me for a ratings point or two. Our family became fodder for the tabloids but I understood that much of it was necessary to fight the good fight.

I was urged to keep going, to present the most attractive face I could to the public to obtain the sympathy and support we needed to meet the political and international challenges I faced in my fight for the children. Some days I loathed myself as I looked in the mirror and reached for the camouflage make-up to conceal the dark circles under my eyes, and cleaned my teeth and brushed my hair as it fell in great clumps from my head (for I had developed rapid alopecia), before facing another media maelstrom. ‘Sweetheart, pretty women get more sympathy than ugly ones,’ Iain told me a few times. The viewing public didn’t want to see a sleep-deprived, near-suicidal woman on their screens every night – I had to appeal to everyman and everywoman, and I hated myself for being so calculating when all I truly wanted to do was sit in my filthy bathrobe and weep for my lost babies. Desperation takes you down many paths and makes very strange acquaintances best friends. Fame, notoriety and celebrity harness together the strangest acolytes and yoke them to you until the direction you wanted to go in is only the vaguest of memories.

But grief and longing for your children, that’s a different matter – you learn to cope outwardly, to ensure the comfort of others, to not break down and upset them with your pain. But the grief stays there, the pain ever present, even as I lay in my bed in faraway Macedonia. It was as if a giant apple corer had excised an enormous chunk of my soul, and in its place a tight, drum-like membrane had grown that reverberated with every whisper of a word that reminded me of my lost ones.

The mourning continued as well; I mourned for the ‘what-ifs’ and the lost moments – I mourned for all the first’s I’d missed and the childhood secrets to which I could never be privy. I mourned the lost opportunity to nurture and guide, and I even missed the smelly teenage socks and the messy rooms I would never see. Death robs a parent of all future and quashes their dreams; abduction tortures a parent with the emptiness of the future, and all of the potential never witnessed in its fruition.

Life in the preceding years, before this point in which I found myself in the middle of an armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia, had proved to be unchartered territory for which I had no compass and no complete plan, but reflecting back, I realised how far the journey had brought me.

When questioned by strangers about my past, I would trot out the prickly and succinct family history, almost as a challenge.

‘On the 9th of July 1992, my two children, Iddin and Shah, were kidnapped and I haven’t seen or spoken to them since.’

I’d been accused of using the media to further their cause, and for that I would make no apology. I chose to keep agitating in the media, and any other avenue I could identify, all the while holding onto a tiny bead of hope that perhaps news of my continued fight would permeate through to Iddin and Shahirah in their cloistered existence in Malaysia, so that they would know how much I loved them both and that I would never give up fighting for their return.

My media expertise, and that of my most immediate circle, lent itself to this avenue. Had I been a doctor, would I have been expected to stand idly by after an accident in which my own child was injured and give no first aid, waiting ineffectually for an ambulance to arrive? I used the only skills I had to help my kids.

The time would eventually come to give other children and parents a voice too – using those same media skills.

Were they bewildered and frightened? Were they trying to comfort each other? Were they crying themselves to sleep every night? When an inkling came through from the Australian government that the ‘children are in Indonesia, travelling towards Malaysia’, I moved heaven and earth, marshalling lawyers on a number of Indonesian islands in an attempt to legally block my ex-husband’s journey through the archipelago, but my efforts proved futile and were particularly thwarted by the intractability of my own government when the powerbrokers refused to pinpoint the exact location of the children even though the intelligence services and the Foreign Ministry had it.

If I am very honest and delve downwards to the darker, most painful elements of self-analysis, I know I began to shrink back into an emotional life where an estrangement from the familiar phrases of living equated themselves to utter loneliness – even though surrounded by others. My shopping list was now devoid of reminders like ‘must buy cornflakes’ or ‘pick up Vicks for Iddin’s chest’, and I pined for the mundanity. Too hard to maintain the normality of relationships from within the context of the family lost, I began to redraw boundaries, to re-contextualise the format of my intimacies. Parts of me hardened like grapes withering on a maternal vine. Other parts began to awaken to the pressure of the invisible band of copper wire entwining my torso and constricting my capacity to be who I had been in the other life, and so disallowing me the ability to move entirely outside of its deceptive malleability as a metal. It was a restrictor nonetheless that allowed me growth only in its chosen direction, and that direction compelled me to search out other parents who had a parity of grief and isolation to my own.

Knowledge, I felt, would arm and sustain me, and the repository of this knowledge, must, I had reasoned, be other parents of abducted children.

But, the bottom line was that I was teetering on the brink of my own emotional implosion, spreading myself so thin my nerve endings were transparent. Simultaneously, I was writing my first book, Once I Was a Princess, dealing with the sheer hard slog of arranging and researching a multi-country film shoot, and skeltering through life at a frenetic pace. I was doing anything I could put my hand to so I didn’t have a spare moment to think and could fall into bed every night exhausted. It was also becoming harder to ignore the obvious fissures in my marriage – random and oddly placed, the cracks were beginning to resemble the plasterwork in an earthquake shattered building. Forces (some of which I had manufactured to cope after the abduction) were pushing me over a brink I felt I could never rescale if I didn’t take definitive action.

Because of the sexual abuse I’d suffered as a child at the hands of my mother and stepfather, and their subsequent machinations, I was pretty skittish about baring my naked anguish more than necessary. However, once I had begun my twice-weekly discussions with Dr Julie Jones, a clarity of thought allowed me to look at the broader picture of my life, and to sketch out what sort of condition I wanted to be in once I reached my final destination and the day when I could hold my children again.

The freedom to express my emotions to Julie – unfettered by social constraints – was like water to a parched man in the desert. Liberated at last from the social niceties and sensitivities which had tainted all my conversations since the abduction of the children, it was a relief to be able to dissect the torments sleep presented for me and to rail against the platitudes people felt compelled to mouth in my direction. What could I say when faced with a sympathetic look on a stranger’s face, a comforting hand touching my own and the never-to-be-forgotten line delivered in a quavering tone: ‘I know how you feel, my cat just died.’ (In a deeper part of myself, I realised that grief is relative – only the inner emotional experiences of the person empathising with me could weigh their commiserations – so I had learned to take a deep breath and utter comforting words in return.)

Fortunately, I could laugh and cry with Julie about what became known as the ‘cat bereavement’ episode, and so many others, unconstrained by the fear of causing offence or my deeply ingrained need to be polite. Julie was such a tremendously skilled and sensible psychotherapist, a clinical child psychiatrist specialising in grief counselling, that nothing seemed to throw this compassionate woman at all. Despite all my initial misgivings, she managed to arm me with self-knowledge and new foundations for coping. The next phase of life I was about to enter – travelling overseas to report on the very crime that had so upset my own life – would require all my new-found equilibrium, but with Julie’s encouragement I straightened my shoulders and leapt across the breach.

I wanted to create a cohesive documentary on what child abduction is, and how it is dealt with around the world; to show the social, emotional and political ramifications, and to try to educate parents not to use their children like cudgels with which to beat each other around the head. I decided to profile a number of parental child abduction cases across the world – the children and the families left behind, from New York to Israel, France to Algeria, Belgium to Morocco, Sydney to South Africa via Monaco, and England to Egypt, rounding off with a look at the workings of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva.

The title came easily. It would be called Empty Arms – Broken Hearts. This simple phrase was a succinct summation of my own thoughts and the exhausting futility of all my legal challenges to date, and the personal pleas I made to my former husband’s representatives for just one single phone conversation with Shahirah and Iddin.

My inner battle would be to make my mind function and my intellect work during the filming, even as my soul screamed with every breath: ‘I love you, I love you, come home safe, my babies.’

So my odyssey began. In order to make Empty Arms – Broken Hearts a well-rounded documentary that I hoped wouldn’t be overly parochial, I’d devised a filming schedule which, had I known better, I would have taken an extra set of feet, three more weeks, energy supplements and a lock pick.

Fortunately, the three-member film crew consisted of personal friends and Iain (who was also co-producer alongside me), as the four of us would be living in close proximity for over a month with only two rest days. On our tight budget, we were travelling economy class on all flights – a big concession when you consider that two of the crew were over 6 feet tall – and sharing rooms. When we marshalled at the airport, even with the camera, lights and sound kit pared back to only the barest necessities, our luggage totalled eighteen individually tagged pieces. All the equipment had been registered with international import and export authorities, separately itemised, guaranteed, insured and held under international ‘carnet’ documents (a pre-paid bond arrangement to ensure that no nefarious on-selling activities were taking place).

By the time we finished filming we had travelled to twenty-six locations and been strapped inside all manner of aircraft. We’d rented seven self-drive cars, hired one dilapidated limousine, escaped with our lives in a battered old Mercedes Benz, journeyed in umpteen taxis, sped along in a French bullet train and hadn’t lost one item of luggage.

In many ways the documentary was a confrontation with my greatest fears and nightmares – one that was necessary, though, if I was to stay true to my children and what they might one day know of me. On my odyssey I would re-enter an Islamic state, with much trepidation, and walk the streets of London on a bright spring day with a young boy who had been abducted by his father four times in a campaign of terror and control. Most often, I would see my own face in those of the other parents – a mirror to which, in my lowest moments, I wished my eyes were blinded.

The huge amount of coverage my family’s case had generated led to the public perception that I had some sort of extra power or sterling connections in the palm of my hand and led to other desperate parents contacting me, begging for my assistance or offering information for the documentary. Looking back now, I realise how bizarre it is to research anything without using the Internet. It seems incongruous that in 1994 I didn’t even have email. Instead I burned up telephone lines at all hours of the day and night, following leads and fleshing out snippets of individual stories and family tragedy that often reflected my own.

Before we left Australia, I had made contact with scores of parents around the globe who’d lost their children to kidnap, and I had become privy to some of their darkest moments. Now I wanted the documentary to show that none of us was alone in our despair. I’d also discovered the correct terminology to identify myself: I was now officially a ‘left-behind’ parent.

Shockingly, I had found that far from parental child abduction being confined to a handful of rocky relationships, the international statistics were ominously robust and rapidly increasing.

In 1994, not many nations kept centralised databases on the numbers of children abducted overseas (today, in 2007, this is changing and laws have tightened); however, according to Reunite, an affiliate of the British Lord Chancellor’s Department and the British charitable organisation responsible for assisting victims of child abduction, the United Kingdom was losing an estimated 1,400 children each year. That’s the equivalent of forty kindergartens suddenly being removed from the face of Britain. In France, the estimates for 1994 put the number at 1,000 dossiers, a term used to identify the individual family names, masking the probability that multiple siblings from those thousand families had been kidnapped in that year. Australia kept no comprehensive records in the early 1990s, but official estimates stood at eighty to one hundred cases per year. From the United States, more than 800 children had been taken overseas in 1993 and categorised under the heading of ‘Hague Convention Abductions’ – those statistics were even higher if you added the hundreds of children abducted by family members to countries outside the jurisdiction of the Hague Convention.

Thirteen years on, the estimated numbers of kidnapped children involved in unresolved cases, and hailing from Western nations, still stands at the 1994 figure of 30,000. Many of these children are trapped in a legal void – scattered and hidden in different parts of the world, cut off from all they once knew and loved.

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction is a multilateral international treaty, which came into being in the mid–1980s, to combat the escalating incidence of international parental child abduction.

Simply put, a child taken from a Hague Convention country to another Hague Convention signatory nation must be returned to his or her normal country of residence. Working along the lines of an extradition agreement, the Convention isn’t meant to be used to determine custody rights or other matters. Its primary function is to ensure the safe return of a child to their habitual domicile and to entrust the appropriate courts in that country to hear all the issues pertaining to welfare and custody. Gradually, over the past fifteen years, the Hague Convention has been adopted and ratified by more and more nations. (In 2007, the number of signatory nations was seventy-six, compared to only forty-one in 1995.) Many Middle Eastern, African, Asian and South American nations are still non-signatories to the treaty, which means that children abducted to or from these places have no legal safety net to protect them and assist in their repatriation to their homelands. Iddin and Shahirah weren’t covered by the Hague Convention as Malaysia is not a signatory – there was no safety net for my children.

In any case, even signatory countries sometimes evince confusion or plain pig-headedness when faced with a Hague Convention matter. A significant sector of European Union member states, although Convention signatories, do not readily return children. France and Germany are very difficult countries to deal with in this area of law as there appears to be great internal confusion about the rights of sovereignty versus the precedence of international treaties and self-determination. Tragically this often hampers the proper implementation of the Convention. A strange form of nationalism, sometimes tinged with racism or sexism, can also put a spoke in the wheels of a child’s future. Quite a number of former European colonies and protectorates (such as Algeria and Morocco) are known to automatically refuse to return a child if the abducting parent is one of their own nationals – it is a strange form of what I term ‘post-colonial backlash’.

In front of an uninspiring brownstone building there, Larry Leinoff was waiting for us – a father whose little girl, Audrey Bloom-Leinoff, had vanished, aged four, six years earlier in 1988. Quietly mannered, with a neat salt-and-pepper beard and hound-dog eyes, Larry took us into his spartan living room. He sat and spoke about Audrey as the cameras rolled and the hot television lights reflected off the blinds. As he talked, Larry’s hands constantly wandered to the dog-eared photographs of his small daughter arrayed on the arm of his chair.

Marcia Bloom-Leinoff, Larry’s former wife, had scrambled for valid reasons to disallow Audrey’s grandparents and father from having contact with the child. Unsubstantiated claims were thrown into the legal arena, definitively investigated by the authorities and a battery of child abuse specialists – and proved to be unfounded. However, by bamboozling the legal system into months of mandatory but fruitless investigations, Marcia had enough time to spirit Audrey out of America and into Israel, where the mother and daughter simply disappeared and have not been heard of since. How bitter it was to reflect on the grave disservice women inflict on each other and society with such untrue allegations.

Larry now maintains a website in the hope that one day his daughter, Audrey, may contact him, even if only out of curiosity – if she knows he exists.

My first instance of face-to-face contact with another left-behind parent of longstanding provided me with a concrete example of the effect of a child’s long absence. Before me – devoid of window dressing – the emotions and the heartache had been so nakedly revealed in Larry’s eyes.

A frustrating misconception that only fathers abduct children has prevailed for a long time. But abduction is not a gender issue – it’s so often about power and revenge.

Leaving Brooklyn that night, I turned my head to look out the window of the cab so the others wouldn’t see the tears that welled in my eyes and trickled down my cheeks. As we headed back to Manhattan, steam rose wraith-like from the subway manholes that dotted the city’s streets and whispered upwards against the chill of the early April night as if to echo my wavering hopes that my own children would return before I, too, had six years of yearning etched deeply on my face.

I hadn’t been inside a church for a long time. With the exception of Christmas and my beloved nanna’s funeral, I’d purposefully stayed away from any building of Christian worship to guard against public conclusions that religion was a huge mainstay in my life. The Christianity versus Islam debate had become such an issue in the media after the kidnap of Iddin and Shah that I had perhaps over-analysed how my attendance at a church would be perceived publicly. Nor had I wanted to further inflame my former husband’s religious sensibilities, or those of his supporters, who considered my children’s abduction an act of jihad – Muslim holy war. Here though, in a city thousands of miles away from prying eyes, I was anonymous.

I never prayed; I simply wasn’t what one would call religious. In fact, I certainly wasn’t a Catholic by virtue of my own convictions on abortion and divorce; but instinctively I reached out my hand for two tapers. Touching the wicks of both slim candles to one of the small flames, I added mine to the long bank of votive candles flickering in the draughty vestibule of the cathedral. Sinking to my knees in the nearest pew, I murmured under my breath a plea to some higher power I could not even name or identify, but knew existed.

‘Please bring them home to me, please keep them safe, please let them know I love them with all my heart and soul – always.’

And so began a pattern for me wherever I was in the world (except Australia). I would seek out the oldest church, regardless of denomination, and light two votive candles, always compelled to murmur the same hopeful words about my children. That simple and private action became as much an imperative of hope to me as it was an act of defiance. The flames flickering in their holders were primitive and ancient, spiritual and timeless, symbolising humankind’s ingenuity and resourcefulness and my own burning desire to keep my kidnapped children safe from the coldness of the act perpetrated against them.

Choosing to make Empty Arms – Broken Hearts was not a very effective way to combat my yearning for Iddin and Shahirah. Everywhere we travelled my thoughts would turn to them and the knowledge that, for the moment, the closest we could all be was the presence of their photographs pinned inside my pocket every day as I dressed for the filming ahead – a kind of talisman of faith.

Patsy is petite and blonde, a no-nonsense woman with a generous spirit and a wicked sense of humour. Violently opposed to make-up and the frivolity of fashion, her one concession to adornment is her diamond jewellery. Teamed with faded denim jeans and T-shirts, the stones glitter and wink incongruously from her fingers and neck. Patsy presides over her brood with love, logic and laughter in a rambling stone house, complete with menagerie of pets, in Ambly, a beautiful village in the French-speaking part of Belgium.

When I first met Patsy, she had painted the windows of the house with bunnies and Easter eggs and her home seemed to embrace all who entered with its warmth and welcome. Patsy and her second husband, Walter, had produced three more little ones during the period Simon, Marina and Moriah were missing – Olivier, Gautier and Noelie – all of whom adored their older siblings. I felt like I already knew Patsy well, as we had spent hours talking on the phone about child abduction before I even set foot in Ambly. Patsy is a pivotal force in the field of parental child abduction in Belgium and Europe, counselling and giving practical assistance to other parents whose children have vanished.

Patsy’s older children had been abducted by her estranged first husband in 1987, and for the years they were missing Patsy had fought hard to maintain her reason. Her sheer nervous energy fuelled an exhaustive international search and public campaign for her three children, which she spearheaded with her amazingly tenacious father, Jacques, and the Belgian police inspector Jean Dooms.

In 1990 the children’s father was arrested by the FBI in New York, extradited to Belgium and jailed for three years. During this time he refused to divulge the whereabouts of the children. He relished his revenge and enjoyed Patsy’s suffering. Domestic violence became a link between Patsy’s story and my own – that, and the newly found religious fundamentalism of the fathers involved.

Just when hope had worn thin, the FBI followed up a tip from the public and finally located Patsy’s children in a Hassidic Jewish community in New York State. The children had been told their mother was dead, and the youngest, Moriah, could not remember Patsy at all. Haim, their father, had dumped them with the ultra-Orthodox group years earlier and never returned.

While we were in the US, I had wanted to speak to the normally cloistered Hassidic community in an attempt to understand why they’d aided and abetted a child abduction; and, in particular, whether or not the family with whom the three children had lived for over three years were aware of their complicity in an illegal action, or had been duped.

My excursion with the film crew to Bedford Hills in upstate New York turned into one of the most bizarre nights of my life. The only way we could make the three-hour journey, cost being a major consideration, was to hire a ‘limousine’ from the cousin of our hotel doorman. When the vehicle creaked up to the hotel entrance, we all clambered in, slamming the door behind us – an action which promptly caused the door to become unhinged and fall to the sidewalk. It did not augur well.

After hasty repairs, we set off at a reasonable hour from the city, but after many hours’ travelling time and noting the fading light, I began to get a little apprehensive about our tight schedule. For 150 miles, Juan, our driver from the Bronx, had assured us he knew where he was going, until he suddenly pulled over and informed us he was lost. I found myself standing in wintry darkness, illuminated like a startled rabbit in the headlights of our vehicle, outside a white clapboard picture theatre in a small town of quintessential American apple-pie charm. The hope was that someone inside would provide directions to the community we were seeking. Luckily, the ticket seller had a vague idea, and after much discussion we set off again with a hand-drawn map scribbled on the back of a movie flyer, taking it in turns to cling to the loose door lest it detach itself from the vehicle once more.