It is estimated that anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 international child abductions occur every year. The majority of children taken out of the country they live in are abducted by a family member. While inside of the United States one-third of family abduction cases are resolved within 30 days and as many as 90% within 2 years, the same statistics do not apply to international child abductions. Something that Karl Hindle knows all too well. At only 11 months old, his daughter, Emily Rose Hindle, was taken from her home in England to America by her mother, Shelia Fuith.

Emily Rose at 9 Months old with her Father, Karl Hindle

At 39, Karl was looking forward to all the good things in life. He had just sold a lucrative business that he had worked at building for 10 years. He had just purchased a house where he lived in the UK. He was engaged and he had a beautiful baby girl named Emily. “The idea that child abduction or something could happen, even that one of my children could be neglected, left to go blind, just…you know, that was something that you might read about in the papers or catch on the news now and again.” But in early 2003, the bottom dropped out. “I’m not the same man I was on the 6^th of January, 2003, which was the day before my little girl was taken,” Karl says, “and I won’t ever be the same man again.” So began Karl Hindle’s 8 year battle to get his daughter back…and it seems to be far from over.

For close to a decade Karl has been going through every available channel and endless miles of red tape to recover Emily. In 2004 he went to the US for custody hearings. It was almost 7 months after Emily was taken that Karl was able to see her. Just over one month after their first visit, while he was waiting to see his beloved little girl again, Karl was arrested and jailed for 5 weeks. He was arrested in Florida due to manipulations regarding his visa—which is generally unnecessary for UK citizens visiting the United States. He was subsequently put on a plane back to England.

Incarceration was an absolute nightmare for Karl Hindle. But he found that the experience changed his whole attitude about the situation. Spending more than a month out of contact with the outside world forced him to reassess. “It made me realize at that time that if I was going to do what I was going to do, I had to stop being frightened, stop being angry, and had to really think, what was the justification, what was I doing this for… And I decided it was not for me, it was for my little girl.” He has still seen Emily only once in the last 5 years, despite court orders for visitation in the US which have been continuously thwarted by the mother and her new husband, a law enforcement officer in Florida.

As a writer, Karl decided to start a blog about everything he was going through at EmilyRoseHindle.BlogSpot.Com. He found not only an outlet, but other parents in similar abduction situations and has since offered comfort, compassion and understanding as well as solid advice and assistance whenever possible to other left behind parents. Among other endeavors, currently Hindle is doing all that he can to assist an American father named Roy Koyama recover his little daughter (also named Emily) from Costa Rica where she was taken by her mother, Trina Atwell.

In addition to giving what help he can to other parents, Karl Hindle recently had a triumph when a piece of legislation that he co-authored for the state of Virginia was unanimously voted to be signed into law. He says that Virginia is taking a major “pioneering step” with the signing of this bill. One of the biggest points is that it will allow the assets of the abductor to be seized when they commit the heinous crime of taking a child. It also recognizes that cases where kids are abducted INTO Virginia are just as serious and in need of attention as cases where children are taken out of Virginia. Hindle thinks that McClellan, Quinn and Martin of the Virginia legislature deserve a pat on the back for their work in getting this legislature passed and he hopes that Virginia’s action will spur the rest of the nation into following suit.

Karl strongly advises any parent in this situation to above all, stay calm and collected and when that isn’t possible—and sometimes it just isn’t—to rely on the people around you to do it for you. For Mr. Hindle, the key thing to remember is to never quit. “The fundamental thing is that you must not quit.  When I die, I will remember Emily remembering, telling me that I was her daddy [Emily had been abducted yet again out of Florida by her mother and was classified as “missing & endangered” by US authorities]. If you quit, you’ll never experience that moment. And when you get that time with your child, you’ll always cherish it… If you don’t quit, you’ll get to see your child. Maybe not till they’ve grown up, but you’ll get to see them at some point. Maybe not as much as you’d like, but those moments are absolutely gold. That spark of recognition when she was 3 years old, I’ll remember that until my dying day.”

Emily and her Father have only seen each other once in the past 5 years.