Ms Geraldine Kelly:

When we work with families, some people always worry about the passport at the start; who has the passport, where is it going to be and is somebody going to take the child without telling the other parent? It is often the case that through the mediation support, working with parents and helping them to communicate and share parenting, that worry starts to die down as they start to trust each other and there is less concern about who has the passport. I have not met a family where someone has abducted a child but I have met a lot of families where it was initially a huge concern. Through a great deal of work over a number of months and a couple of years, their concern has decreased to the stage where they are quite happy to pass the passport freely from one parent to the other or they leave it with a solicitor. I do not know how much they pay the solicitor to mind it for them. It comes back to supporting people to get past the conflict so that they trust each other to take children out of the country and bring them back again. There are obviously always huge issues and thankfully we have the Hague convention relationship with lots of countries as a support and to ensure that things are safe.