The Hague Convention on International Child Abduction normally applies to situations where a child is living with one or more parents before the international abduction. Therefore, the parent and the child will usually share the same home and country.
However, this is not always the case. For children who are sent to boarding school, the time spent with parents at the family home may only occupy a small portion of their time. To these children, the boarding school may seem more like “home” than their parent’s house. This raises the problem of whether the child should be returned to the parent’s home even in situations where the child does not normally live there.
A related issue was specifically decided in the case Re P. (G.E.) (An Infant). The court ruled that, when parents live together in a family home, the child’s “home” would be the parents’ house, regardless of where the child was educated. This ruling places a strong emphasis on the parents’ control over the child and interprets the child and parent’s home as one in the same under almost all circumstances.
Other cases have taken this rule even further. In the case Re A. (Minors)(Abduction: Habitual Residence), the judge specifically stated that a child’s home is “necessarily” the same as the parent’s. This is especially true in cases where the child is of a very young age and unable to care for him or herself.
While this rule may make sense for small children, the reasoning behind this rule fails to apply in cases where teenagers leave the house on their own. Unlike a small child, a teenager is generally able to care for him or herself and a strong argument could be made that the teenager might have a separate home from his or her parents under a variety of situations but a separate rule for teenagers has yet to be established.