Tied Across Borders grew out of lived experience.

I found myself trying to protect the most important person and relationship in my life, my young daughter, while enduring a prolonged pattern of coercive behaviour that continued across international borders. Simply ending contact was not an option without risking the very relationship I was trying to protect. For a long time, I felt trapped between protecting myself and protecting what mattered most to me.

Eventually, the impact on my physical and mental health became too great to ignore. I decided there had to be another path.

Tied Across Borders began with a simple conviction: no one should have to choose between protecting themselves and protecting a person, relationship or responsibility that connects them to another country.

My own circumstances are why I recognised the need for this work. They are not the purpose of the organisation. For legal, privacy and safeguarding reasons, I do not publish detailed information about my family or ongoing matters. Tied Across Borders should be judged by the quality of its work, the evidence it produces and the people it helps.

The problem is bigger than any one case

For someone trying to bring cross-border abuse or coercive control to an end, one of the first challenges is simply understanding where to turn.

Which institution is responsible? In which country? What happens when one part of the problem is dealt with by the police, another by a family court, another by an immigration authority and another by a technology platform?

People can find themselves navigating psychological support, policing, social services, translation and interpretation, notaries, financial support, family law, criminal law, immigration systems, consular processes and digital safety — sometimes across several countries at once.

And too often, navigating those systems can feel like a full-time job in itself.

A person may effectively be expected to become an expert in the laws, institutions and bureaucratic procedures of a country where they do not live, whose citizenship they do not hold and whose language they may not even speak. They may need to work out which authority has jurisdiction, which documents are required, how to have them translated, notarised or legalised, how to instruct a lawyer from abroad, what support they are entitled to access and which organisations or professionals can be trusted — often while already under enormous emotional, financial and practical pressure.

Clear, reliable and affordable guidance can be remarkably difficult to find. Information is frequently scattered across government websites, legal practices, charities and institutions, each dealing with only one part of the problem. Knowing that help technically exists is very different from knowing what help you need, where to find it, whether it is reliable and how to access it affordably from another country.

Asking for help can itself require a leap of faith

Even once somebody identifies a possible route forward, accessing it can involve significant personal and financial risk.

Hiring a lawyer, translator, notary, investigator or other professional in your own country can already be daunting. Doing so thousands of miles away, in an unfamiliar legal and cultural environment, is something else entirely.

A person may be asked to transfer substantial sums of money to somebody they have never met, with little ability to independently judge whether the fee is reasonable, whether the professional is reputable, whether the promised work has actually been completed or what realistic avenues for redress exist if something goes wrong. Language barriers, distance and unfamiliar complaints procedures can make challenging poor service or recovering money particularly difficult.

For somebody already experiencing coercion or financial abuse, that leap of faith can be enough to prevent them seeking help at all.

There can also be a profound imbalance between the two people involved.

The person using abusive behaviour may be operating in their own country, in their own language, within institutions they understand and among professional and personal networks they can access locally. The person trying to stop that behaviour may be attempting to navigate those same systems remotely, as a foreign national, sometimes without residency, local contacts or fluent command of the language.

Even where laws formally provide equal rights, that practical imbalance matters.

People may understandably worry about whether they will be believed, whether being a foreigner will place them at a disadvantage, whether local connections could influence a process, whether corruption is a risk, or whether they will receive genuinely impartial treatment. Those fears may or may not reflect how a particular institution ultimately handles their case, but the absence of trustworthy information and independent guidance can make it extremely difficult for somebody outside the country to assess the risk.

Access to justice is not meaningful if a person cannot confidently work out how to access it.

Seeking protection should not require greater exposure to harm

There is another contradiction at the heart of many cross-border cases.

To make an abusive person stop, the burden often falls on the person experiencing the abuse to initiate proceedings, collect evidence, pay professionals, translate documents, attend appointments and repeatedly explain what has happened.

In an international case, doing that may require renewed engagement with the country, institutions or circumstances connected to the abuse.

Someone who has deliberately created physical distance for their own safety may discover that meaningful action requires them to travel back. Someone who has restricted communication with an abusive person may be told that a legal or administrative process requires further contact. Someone who has spent months trying to create distance from a harmful situation can find themselves being pulled closer to it simply to ask the authorities to help make it stop.

That creates a painful paradox: the process of seeking protection can itself require greater exposure to the person, place or circumstances from which somebody is trying to protect themselves.

Nobody should have to take unnecessary risks with their safety simply to demonstrate that they need protection.

Where does somebody turn first?

Embassies and consulates can understandably seem like the natural first port of call. Yet consular services are not generally designed to provide comprehensive support for complex cross-border abuse cases, and staff may have limited specialist training or guidance on how domestic abuse, coercive control, family proceedings, digital harassment, immigration issues and safeguarding can intersect across jurisdictions.

A person can therefore contact the institution that most obviously represents their country abroad and still leave without a clear route forward.

The same fragmentation can exist elsewhere. A police force may understandably focus on conduct within its jurisdiction. A family lawyer may focus on family proceedings. An immigration adviser may focus on immigration status. A domestic abuse organisation may be limited by geography. A technology platform may consider only what happened through its service.

Each may deal competently with the piece in front of them.

The person experiencing the abuse, however, has to deal with all of it at once.

That is the gap.

The result can be an exhausting, expensive and deeply isolating process at precisely the moment when somebody is already trying to regain control of their life.

Falling between existing systems

There are outstanding organisations working in areas closely connected to this issue: domestic abuse services, migrant-support organisations, digital-safety organisations and international child-abduction specialists such as Reunite.

Their work is essential.

But people experiencing abuse that operates through an international connection can still fall between those systems. Their circumstances may involve elements of several different areas without fitting neatly within the remit of any one of them.

Across countries and legal systems, case law and lived experience show people remaining trapped in harmful situations because an important dependency or connection remains: a child, immigration status, money, property, employment, documents or another obligation that cannot simply be walked away from.

Often, the first problem is not a lack of willingness to act.

It is not knowing where to begin.

Isolation makes that harder. Cross-border abuse can feel extraordinarily specific and personal, leaving people convinced that nobody else could possibly understand the situation they are trying to navigate. One of the clearest lessons from the early research behind Tied Across Borders was that these experiences are far less unusual than they can feel to the person living through them.

Protecting yourself should not mean abandoning what matters

I suffered in silence for a long time because I believed protecting myself might mean losing the relationship I most wanted to protect.

If Tied Across Borders can help somebody understand that those two things do not have to be incompatible, that protecting yourself does not mean abandoning a child, loved one, livelihood or responsibility in another country, then it will already have achieved something important.

But the gap this organisation is trying to address is much bigger than my situation, and much bigger than any one gender, nationality or type of relationship.

Parents remain connected through children. Migrants through visas, sponsorship and documentation. Workers through wages, contracts and passports. Former partners through homes, property, money, pets and shared accounts. Families can remain connected through care responsibilities, inheritance and financial dependence.

Borders may separate people geographically, but technology increasingly allows control, harassment and abuse to continue across them.

As artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, impersonation and other technologies develop, the ways in which abuse can operate internationally are likely to become more complex. The systems designed to protect people must develop rapidly with them.

That is why Tied Across Borders exists: to help people understand and navigate the systems they face; identify reliable and affordable routes to support; reduce the risks involved in seeking help across borders; connect expertise that currently sits in separate places; build better evidence about cross-border abuse; and advocate for systems that understand the disadvantage faced by somebody trying to seek protection from outside the country where part of that protection must be obtained.

At its heart is a simple principle:

Abuse can cross borders. Protection must be able to cross them too.

Danny Wiser, Founder

Danny holds a Master's in International Relations and Global Issues from the University of Nottingham. He has more than a decade of experience as a journalist reporting in both the UK and Latin America for major organisations including The Economist, The Guardian and the BBC, and has experience in the advocacy space working with the BBC's 50:50 The Equality Project and unconnected.org.