Olivia Gentile, The 19Th

Content warning: This story contains graphic depictions of domestic violence. This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.

Their first kiss was in the laundry room of a hostel.

It was 2010, and Jewel Lazaro was road-tripping through British Columbia before starting community college in her hometown, Seattle. She was assigned several roommates at a Vancouver hostel, one of them an intriguing Irishman.

Seth Colchester was dark haired and blue eyed, and seemed to know a little about everything. He’d grown up surrounded by sheep and cows on an organic farm, but was working as a deejay in Spain, he told Jewel. After a night of dancing and flirting, they found privacy amid the hum of the washing machines.

They dated long distance. In 2013, when she was 23, Jewel moved to Dubai to work as a flight attendant for Emirates. It was exciting to crisscross the globe every week, but before long she was exhausted.

Seth told her to quit, she said. She could move into his loft in Barcelona and pursue her passions — singing, songwriting, art.

“I loved him, and I trusted him,” she said. “I was really naive.”

In close quarters, Jewel said she saw a new side of her boyfriend. “He would constantly belittle me and make me feel stupid,” she said. “He would say things he knew would make me upset, then get mad at me for being emotional.”

He told her birth control pills were unhealthy, and she should stop taking them, she said. She did. In spring 2014, she found out she was pregnant.

That’s also when Seth first became violent, she later said in court papers. Angry that she wouldn’t accompany him to a party one night, he hurled a ceramic bowl filled with hot soup at her head, she said. In her second trimester, when she asked him to slow down on a drive in the country, he allegedly hit her, dragged her out of the car and to the ground, and sped off, leaving her in a field for hours. Afterward, she emailed a domestic violence crisis center, which urged her to call its hotline or the police. But Seth apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again, she said.

After fleeing Spain with her daughter in 2018, Jewel alleged in a sworn court declaration that her ex-partner, Seth Colchester, had abused her. (The 19th/TYPE)

Their daughter was born in early 2015. For privacy, she is identified only by her middle name, Lucia.

Seth grew even more volatile after Lucia’s arrival, according to Jewel’s court papers. One day, he allegedly ripped the child from Jewel’s breast, hoisted her above his head, and ran around the house with her as Jewel begged him to give her back.

In the same court papers, Jewel alleged that Seth was a drug dealer. He’d shown her a warehouse where he was growing a vast crop of cannabis under special lights, she said. There had been garbage bags full of marijuana in the basement of a home he rented in the countryside, she said, and stacks of cash buried in plastic in the yard.

By the time Lucia was six months old, the warehouse had burned down, the basement had been burglarized, and the dog had dug up the money, according to Jewel. She later said she asked Seth to find a safer line of work, but he didn’t. In spring 2016, she left him.

He paid for her and Lucia’s new apartment, and she said he routinely let himself in and yelled at her. One day, when she was out, he smashed her guitar. In winter 2018, he told her she couldn’t live there anymore.

In the sworn declaration she filed in court after fleeing Spain in 2018, Jewel accused Seth of growing and trafficking large amounts of marijuana. (The 19th/TYPE)

Shortly after, Jewel made a startling discovery. Arriving to pick up Lucia from her private, progressive preschool, Jewel saw her lying on her back with her leggings down as two older boys touched her between the legs. A teacher looked on from a few feet away.

Jewel demanded a meeting with school officials, which she recorded and got Seth to attend. Sexual “play” among the children, supervised by adults, was a normal, permissible activity at the school — a game like any other, the officials said.

Jewel was horrified, but Seth said he trusted the school.

“This was the first time I got up the strength to flee my abuser,” Jewel wrote in court papers.

In April, without warning Seth, she took Lucia across the Atlantic Ocean, to her mother’s home in Sultan, Washington. Immediately, she hired a lawyer, who helped her file for custody in Snohomish County Superior Court. In a sworn statement, she portrayed Seth as an abusive criminal who couldn’t safely raise their child.

Seth declined a request for an interview, saying he wanted to protect his daughter’s privacy, and he didn’t respond to a list of detailed questions. But in Snohomish County court papers, he “unequivocally” denied Jewel’s allegations and sought to dismiss the custody suit. In the same court, he filed a petition summoning Lucia back to Spain. He cited a treaty Jewel hadn’t heard of: the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

The pact was brokered by mostly Western diplomats in 1980, when divorce rates were soaring. There was a consensus, supported by limited data, that fathers who had lost custody of their children were kidnapping them and hiding them abroad, leaving mothers with no means of redress. In the United States, the media told heartbreaking stories of American children who’d vanished into the Middle East with their violent immigrant fathers.

The Hague Abduction Convention was brokered by mostly Western diplomats. There are now more than 100 member states in North America, Europe, South America, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa. (The 19th/TYPE)

Congress implemented the treaty in 1988 with the passage of the International Child Abduction Remedies Act, or ICARA, and the State Department pressed other nations to follow. Countries in the convention — today, there are more than 100 — must return one another’s children when a parent asks, subject to various exceptions. In 2021, the last year for which numbers are available, more than 2,190 return petitions were filed around the world, including more than 300 seeking the return of children who, like Lucia, were brought to the United States from abroad.

But contrary to what the drafters anticipated, only a minority of petitions are filed by mothers, according to data from the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which administers the treaty. In 2021, fathers filed about 73 percent of cases in the United States and about 75 percent worldwide.

Often, their wives and children had good reason to run, The 19th and Type found in a 16-month investigation.

Jewel is pictured with her daughter, Lucia, during a visit with family in Washington state in 2015. (Courtesy of the Lazaro family)

We interviewed Jewel and 25 other “Hague mothers,” most of them Americans who fled Europe and Latin America. We also analyzed all the rulings published in U.S. Hague cases from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2024. In each case, a parent who lived overseas was petitioning for the return of at least one child brought to the United States.

This analysis suggests that, in many ways, Jewel’s situation is typical. Out of 114 published cases, 77 percent were filed by fathers against mothers, at least 79 percent of whom accused the petitioning father of spousal abuse, child abuse or both. We did not attempt to independently verify the abuse claims, but scholars have found that neither children nor mothers are likely to fabricate abuse claims during custody disputes.

Responding mothers, 44 percent of whom were American, commonly said in court papers that their exes had raped, strangled or threatened to kill them abroad, often in front of the children. Mothers also accused fathers of biting them, hitting them, shoving them into walls and to the ground, stealing from them, demeaning them, stalking them, hacking into their email, and blocking their access to money, transportation and friends. Some mothers accused fathers of molesting or beating the children. One petitioning father had been convicted in Israel of whipping his daughter with a belt; another was incarcerated in Scotland for killing his mother.

By design, however, both the treaty and ICARA favor petitioners. The exceptions to return are narrow, the burden of proof is on the respondent, and the resolution is supposed to be swift.

Often, mothers who claim abuse cite the treaty’s “grave risk” exception, which allows judges to deny a petition if return could expose the children to physical or psychological harm or an otherwise “intolerable situation.” But in our study sample, judges rarely accepted the grave risk defense, even when it was supported by evidence such as text messages, photographs, medical records, domestic violence restraining orders and police reports. Overall, fathers accused of abuse stood a 55 percent chance of winning their children’s return, either through an order or a settlement, compared to 58 percent of petitioners in general.

Many mothers who lose Hague cases in the United States fight for custody overseas, but, cast as kidnappers, they often lose, experts say. Some mothers we interviewed are allowed only weekends and holidays with their children, while others have been banished from their lives. A few have faced criminal kidnapping charges.

Typically, Hague mothers are left broke, frightened and desperate. Many have been begging for help for years, to no avail.

“There are so many men’s rights groups and men’s activist groups, and they have so much money and so much support, and we have no money, just a whole heap of mothers reaching through their screens and holding hands together in solidarity,” said an Australian mother whose anonymous Instagram, Her Hague Story, is devoted to women and children affected by the treaty. “Once you’re Hagued, it’s just all about survival.”