Child Recovery Australia’s Col Chapman on recovering kidnapped children from overseas

Snatching children from unsuspecting parents in foreign lands was never on Colin Chapman’s bucket list — but neither was becoming an international expert in recovering kidnapped kids.

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His unique career has made Colin Chapman the desperate last resort for many parents reeling in the cruel limbo caused when their spouse abducts their kids and illegally flees abroad.

Mr Chapman’s career as a private investigator has morphed into a single focus on kidnapped kids and the growth of his company, Child Recovery Australia.

Often the final port of call for frantic parents who have exhausted all legal avenues and attempts at an amicable solution, Mr Chapman has no qualms about the job’s ethics.

A UNIQUE GRIEF

Some abduction cases end with an amicable return and custody arrangement — but such happy endings are far from the norm.

Too many mums and dads never find their child or even learn if they are alive. They endure a perpetual pain which few could understand, Mr Chapman says.

“In many ways it’s worse than the death of a child for many parents,” he says.

“It is a horrible experience for those left behind, because the child has disappeared.

“It’s not dead and you can’t grieve, but the grief is real.”

Colin Chapman.

The wider family unit, especially grandparents, are further victims.

Mr Chapman says grandparents are robbed of bonds with their grandchildren that should “reignite their lives, and make them feel they’re young again”.

It’s more than 20 years since Mr Chapman helped a Channel 7 current affairs show to track a child snatched and held by a runaway parent.

The prime-time exposure sparked a rush that shows no signs of abating.

“My phone just ran hot. People were calling asking ‘can you find my child?’, ‘can you help me get my child back?’ It was an eye-opener,” he recalls.

“I was pretty naive to child abduction back in those days. A lot of people don’t realise what child abduction is really.

“They think that because a child is with a parent that everything is OK.

“The children of feuding families often silently bear the worst of the vitriol, chaos and heartache.

“It is proven worldwide the damage and harm that is done to a child when it’s denied access to a loving parent.”

LOVE AND BORDERS

The vast majority of the cases he handles are “cross-cultural relationships”, which Mr Chapman says have a common thread in his years of experience at the coalface.

“If the father has abducted the child, the majority of the time it’s the Middle East,” he says.

“And if the mother has abducted the child the majority of the time it’s Asia, because a lot of Australian men are having Asian brides.

“We are also getting a lot of Eastern Europeans as well in the past few years as more men seek out Russian brides through the internet.”

India and Pakistan “are a bit of a black hole”, he says.

“One mother is working two jobs at the moment to try and get back to India.”

With about 30 cases currently on his books, Mr Chapman says he spends anywhere between six weeks and six months — sometimes much longer — in close contact with a parent.

“It’s a living hell for them. If a child is dead you know that’s the end, but for many they don’t know where the child is or if they’re calling someone else mummy or daddy.

“Does she even know about me? Will she come looking for me or does she even know I am alive? That is the sort of questions these people find themselves asking.

“Kids are told lies like ‘your dad was abusive to you and doing things to you’. Or ‘mummy was a drug addict and alcoholic who had affairs’. Or ‘mum or dad is dead’.”

Abducted Child Recovery expert Col Chapman on a recent recovery mission in Abu Dhabi

REVENGE AND SPITE

Mr Chapman pauses when asked if the majority of mothers and fathers who abduct their kids and flee the country are driven by genuine fear for their welfare.

“No, I think sometimes they convince themselves of that to justify their actions,” he says.

“In all of my experience I have found one, maybe two cases where I thought OK, dad was violent and abusive to mum and the children, and I can see why they ran. But it is extremely rare.”

The three most common drivers according to Mr Chapman are revenge, mental illness or sheer spite by a parent willing to use their children as a powerful weapon against their estranged partner.

While false allegations can destroy men and women, Mr Chapman says his experience was that fathers were more commonly falsely accused.

Mr Chapman says there is often little more than a scrap of information to help him on his quest to track down runaway parents and kids.

“Quite often though we just have a starting point, which is often Ho Chi Minh City because Vietnam is a common spot for abductions,” he says.

“Once we locate the children, we will work out how to recover them.”

Unlike some other recovery experts, Mr Chapman has a rule of thumb that no child will be snatched back without their parent being involved.

“We will have the parent with us in every instance. They are the ones that handle their kids, we just provide a safe environment for them to do that,” he says.

Sally Faulkner with her kids Noah and Lahlea.

THE BIG STING

Playgrounds or fast-food outlets offer a window of opportunity, Mr Chapman says.

“We might try and do something at Macca’s when mum might go to the bathroom,” he explains.

“Then dad comes in and says: ‘Hey! C’mon kids, let’s go’. Or it might be at a park where the kids might be playing and mum comes in and grabs the kids while we distract the dad.

“Then we extract the kids back to Australia, where the Family Court can resolve it.”

Mr Chapman is asked constantly about the ethics and morality of kidnapping the kidnapped.

“People say ‘you are just re-abducting the child’. But what we do is, I believe, still the least harmful to the child,” he says.

He cites cases where the Australian Federal Police are used to forcibly deport children under court orders.

“We send mum or dad in so the kids are familiar. When the Australian Federal Police went in they are armed, they have guns on their hips.”

He insists most children are better off returning to Australia compared to life on the run,

“Australia is regarded as one of the best countries in the world. We have shared parenting and if the abducting parent comes back to Australia, there’s usually a shared care arrangement made.”

PUNISHMENT VARIES

The ramifications for parents guilty of abducting their own children are wildly different depending on the country.

Australia’s conciliatory and gentle approach towards parents who return with their kids is the antithesis of the United States’ hard-line policies.

“In America it is kidnapping and most parents would go to prison for between two years and eight years,” Mr Chapman says.

“America is very, very tough and I don’t agree on jailing parents for child abduction.

“They need a good telling off, but jailing a parent for child abduction only punishes the child.”

Australian authorities tend to agree, usually inflicting a mere ‘slap on the wrist’.

“In most instances the abducting parent isn’t punished. Most of the abducting parents do get shared care when they eventually come back to the country, the whole family can be reunited.”

Australian TV presenter Tara Brown and Sally Faulkner.

Blunt honesty comes with the territory for Mr Chapman.

He succinctly describes the plight of families who cannot afford to pay for lawyers or services such as his.

“They are screwed, they’re stuffed,” he says.

“They can and will get down on their knees and beg. They will literally beg for the abducting parent to show some conscience or sympathy, something, but rarely does that work,” he says.

Two of Mr Chapman’s clients have taken their own lives, that he knows of at least.

“These people go through hell. The suicide rate and the self-medication rate is huge. People mortgage their houses, they start GoFundMe accounts and they are just desperate. They never give up and it is horrific for them.”

COL’S HIDDEN TOLL

“It is emotionally draining. You try to keep at arm’s length and you try as hard as you can, but you can’t,” he says.

“You can’t be a caring human being and be cold about it. Even psychiatrists and psychologists need debriefing to help them deal with the problems that they hear about, day in, day out, from other people. And I do too, sometimes.

“Because you just become so depressed and so sad, very sad. It is so sad to watch a parent grieving and people are lost, floundering and don’t know what to do.”

A ‘MESS RUN BY COWBOYS’

Just two simple words — 60 Minutes — can instantly switch Col Chapman’s amiable demeanour to one of annoyance and frustration.

A “mess run by cowboys” is his blunt appraisal of the infamous April 2016 failed attempt to kidnap the two young children of Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner from a Beirut street. Mr Chapman says the 60 Minutes calamity was a lesson in how not to carry out a child recovery.

The Child Abduction Recovery International organisation — hired by Channel 9 to conduct the filmed “snatch and grab” of Ms Faulkner’s young son and daughter — gave the entire niche industry a bad rap, Mr Chapman says.

The 60 Minutes debacle resulted in nine people, including Ms Faulkner and journalist Tara Brown, held in a Lebanese prison on kidnapping charges before being released.

“It did tarnish it, very much so,” he says. “The company they used had a history … and 60 Minutes had done the same thing in Turkey about six months earlier and that story never went to air.”

Mr Chapman says the CARI organisation had “made it their goal to harass and intimidate us and me online with false allegations and accusations”.

The rival outfits are regularly hired by the Nine and Seven networks respectively. Mr Chapman says the deeper tragedy of the botched recovery was the consequences for Ms Faulkner and the boy and girl who her former partner took to Lebanon in 2015.

“The saddest thing is Sally probably won’t get to see the kids again in the foreseeable future and it did not need to be that way.”