Child recovery specialist: on the hunt
On guard ... private investigator Col Chapman. Photo: Michelle Smith
Col Chapman calls himself a ''child recovery specialist''. Others refer to him as a bounty hunter or even a vigilante. The Australian Federal Police have gone so far as to accuse him of being a mercenary.
But if your estranged partner abducts your child, Chapman might be one of the first people you call, rather than relying on a long court process to deliver your child back to you, often from a foreign land.
Chapman has been at the centre of one of Australia's most high-profile child abduction cases, the so-called Italian sisters who were ordered back to Italy by a Brisbane judge last week. Chapman was hired by the Italian father to counter the enormous public sympathy for the Australian mother who abducted their four daughters two years ago.
Yet like most people, Chapman was horrified by the footage of AFP officers and Department of Child Safety case workers hauling off the girls while their mother gasped in distress.
''Dragging and handcuffing screaming children was outrageous, in my opinion,'' he says. ''We've certainly never done that and never would.
''People will find it hard to criticise our methods after watching that debacle.''
For the past decade Chapman has tracked down abducted children for a living - and business is booming. He fields five calls a week from parents desperate to locate their missing child, and has 14 cases on the go at the moment.
''I'm flat out,'' he says. ''I'm knockin' them back. I can't keep up … I've had parents throw in their jobs, sell their houses, to get their kids back. That's what you do.''
International kidnappings of Australian children are steadily rising, a tragic consequence of the growth in cross-cultural relationships. According to the federal Attorney-General's Department, 163 parents sought their abducted child's return using the Hague Convention last financial year, up from 146 parents two years ago. It's the highest rate of international child abductions a year of anywhere in the world.
Chapman has a personal insight into the traumas of child abduction. His own parents were child abductors - they fled their respective marriages in Britain to sail to Australia together in 1960, taking the three sons they each had with them.
Chapman was born soon after and remembers growing up amid the anguish of his six brothers who were cut off from their mum and dad in England. ''They had a rough upbringing because they remembered their parents. I remember the hurt, the tumult.''
Half a century later Chapman's own young daughter was abducted by his ex-partner, and it took him three weeks to get her back. ''I have a greater depth of understanding of how parents feel now,'' he says.
Chapman's exploits have caught the attention of the AFP, which hauled him in for questioning earlier this year. Chapman insists he uses ''legal tactics'' in his recovery operations, and wears hidden body cameras to film everything.
He reveals while one arm of the federal government has its eye on him, he receives a lot of help from other official channels. But there is always the risk the authorities will try to close him down. ''They might, but a lot of people aren't going to get their kids back,'' Chapman warns.
His methods can be unorthodox, involving honey traps, disguises, sedation, weapons, car chases and crossing international borders. But Chapman stresses the children are never traumatised during the process.
''We've never had a child scream in a recovery ever - there have been a couple of bewildered looks,'' he says. ''A lot of people think it's jumping out of helicopters with guns, but we go in very gently. We try to create a situation, an environment, that is safe for everyone. No one has got hurt.''
To recover one child who was living with his mother in a small village in Malaysia, Chapman moved into the area. He befriended locals and offered the mother a job as a housekeeper. He wined and dined her, and when she fell asleep, the child was smuggled out. ''The child was on a plane before she even woke up the next morning.''
It's clear Chapman gets off on the thrill of the chase. His eyes light up as he recounts a daring rescue attempt in the Algerian desert, infiltrating a Trinidad brothel, and totalling a car during a chase with a Mexican drug lord. ''I like the excitement, I like the action - I get bored easily - and I'm good at it,'' he declares.
But are vulnerable children simply the excuse for him to indulge in these boys' own adventures?
''Not consciously,'' he says, taken aback. ''I don't think, 'Oh beauty a kid has been kidnapped and I get to go where?' I feel like we're really helping someone at their worst moment of pain and distress.''
Child recovery is neither easy nor cheap - it costs about $80,000 to get back a child who has been abducted overseas. Chapman won't attempt a recovery without court orders, and subpoenas bank and phone records to help establish the abducting parent's movements. If he can't negotiate a return of the child, he'll stage a reabduction.
''With Asian parents, threatening to name and shame them is a good weapon,'' he says. ''Arabs are the hardest. They're Alpha males, they're arrogant. You hit them they hit you back. We'll try to negotiate with the local imam, we'll offer them money, but there is no negotiating with Arabs.''
Of the 100-odd cases in which he's been involved, Chapman boasts he's failed to recover only two children. But while every successful rescue results in one happy parent, Chapman says it also earns him 10 new enemies.
Supporters of the mother in the Italian sisters case trashed his reputation on Facebook, and he has been bailed up in the car park of his daughter's preschool on the Sunshine Coast.
Chapman has no patience with mothers who justify child abductions on the basis that their ex-partners are bad fathers. ''I have never ever found a justifiable reason for abducting a child,'' he says. ''The only way to make a better parent is to expose their parenting, not to take the child off them … the child benefits from having both parents in their life. Fathers aren't better than mothers, mothers aren't better than fathers. Women want equal pay, equal rights at work, equal votes; equality doesn't stop at the steps of the Family Court.''
Where once fathers tended to abduct children, the majority of culprits are now mothers, according to Chapman. The shift was sparked by the Howard government's introduction of shared parenting in 2006, which presumes it is in the children's best interests for both parents to equally share parenting responsibility (rather than primary custody usually defaulting to the mother).
Chapman insists child abduction is a form of child abuse. ''I think any parent that denies a loving parent a relationship with a child is very selfish,'' he says.
'You can't sleep at night not knowing if your daughter is OK'
Sydney personal trainer Rashid* has experienced both sides of a child abduction.
A year ago his former wife, Asta, took their daughter to her homeland of Norway without his permission. Now Rashid is holed up in Lebanon with their daughter, whom he in turn abducted three months ago.
Rashid met Asta when she was a student holidaying in Sydney in 2006, and they married three years later. But their relationship broke down under the strain of a new baby. ''We both weren't prepared,'' Rashid recalls.
In August last year Asta took their daughter to meet up with her family in Thailand, and never returned. She emailed her ex-husband from Norway to tell him the relationship was over and there was a better life for her and their daughter in Norway.
''It was the beginning of a nightmare,'' Rashid said. ''You can't sleep at night not knowing if your daughter is OK. What if she falls and I'm not there? What if she's hurt and I'm not there?''
He rang his solicitor, and then Col Chapman, whom he found online. ''The first thing he said to me was, 'Your daughter is coming back,' which was a big relief.''
Chapman and Rashid went to Norway, where they engaged a local lawyer and started legal proceedings, with a back-up plan to smuggle the child out of Norway on a ferry to England. It didn't come to that - Rashid and Asta agreed their daughter would live three months in Australia, one month in Norway and so on.
But when Rashid returned to Australia he couldn't stomach the idea of such an arrangement. After much negotiation, Rashid agreed to move to Norway and share custody with Asta. But once again he got cold feet. ''I'd have to close down my business, relocate to a country where I don't speak the language, and it's expensive. I didn't want to do it, so I decided to run to Lebanon with our daughter.
''I've put myself right now in a really tough spot. You don't realise how big a deal it is until you leave and start living with it. No one is really happy with what I've done; not the government, not my family. I don't blame them.''
Chapman is now trying to negotiate a new custody deal, while Rashid feels bad for the anguish he is putting his former wife through. ''You just can't justify it. For me there was always going to be a winner and a loser … All I want is for us to raise our daughter in Australia.''
* Not his real name.