Children Kidnapped From Loving Parents in Italy 🇮🇹 @60 Minutes Australia

Watch on YouTube · 2026-03-17 · 27 min

0:00 Hi everyone. Some of you asked me to comment about the situation in Italy. Some people who work for the government kidnapped these parents' children because they wanted to live closer to nature. I'm going to review the video that 60 Minutes made about it.

[video] 0:24 It looks like a prison and it is a prison for the children. They were kidnapped from their parents.

[video] 0:43 Brutso for almost four months. Local authorities believe this foster care facility is safer than their own home, where they were being raised totally off the grid with no running water, electricity or formal schooling.

0:59 That's how most people lived just over 100 years ago. What's the problem? Name the problem.

[video] 1:07 What I am fighting is this very, very, very ignorant belief that what we have done to our children was wrong. Astoundingly, authorities have decided Katherine Birmingham and Nathan Trevelyan are bad parents. So bad, in fact, late last year, they took the extreme step of removing their children

1:28 Of course, they remove them. In the media, they always use different words because people who work for the government and wear different clothes cannot kidnap children. No. It's literally kidnapping by every definition of the word, but they simply remove them.

[video] 1:51 How is that even a question?

[video] 2:07 why they're not allowed to live at home with mum and dad. They understand that we live naturally and they understand that a lot of people don't want to. Some not nice people don't like the way we live.

2:21 Of course, because living unnaturally is the norm today. And when they see somebody living naturally, I don't know how they lived exactly. People see that now, I guess. Then it seems abnormal to them. That's how twisted it is. That's why when you see somebody drinking blood and eating raw meat, which is what humans eat in nature, it seems abnormal to you because in reality, you are abnormal. Cooking meat is very abnormal. You actually basically have to be somewhat insane to cook meat, but it's normal today.

[video] 3:02 Nathan insists their eight-year-old daughter and six-year-old twins were thriving. However unconventional their choices may seem, their family was happy and healthy. But now they're trapped in a desperate and very public battle to win back their kids. At the heart of this case is one critical question. What will cause these kids more harm? Growing up in the woods, off the grid, with no traditional schooling, or being forcibly separated from their mum and dad?

3:36 Hmm. Yes, that is a good question. I'm not sure yet. Let's just watch the video.

[video] 3:51 After you. Thank you. It's not everyone's idea of a dream home, but it's clear this is Nathan's castle. OK, so welcome to Amelia. The house is called Amelia? Yeah. What a great name. Yeah. The family bought their patch of paradise five years ago for 20,000 euros, which is just over 30,000 Australian dollars. So is this electricity? Yes, this is running off a solar panel. But you're not connected to power or the... Um, we're not connected, no. This is where your meals are prepared? Yes, yeah. My wife spends all her mornings cooking, generally. I do it once a week. This is our wood stove oven. It feels like it's actually doing a bit of... Yeah. Well, I lit it, and it's been lit for, I don't know, four hours or so. And, of course, it keeps this half of the house warm all day long. Well, you need that. I mean, it's cold. Yeah, yeah. And of course, for cooking, you know, we eat porridge in the morning, cooking in the midday, heating up water for washing up and washing.

4:44 Of course, porridge, typical British breakfast. It isn't in reality, but that's what people believe today. People never used to eat that up until some decades ago, many decades ago, when people experienced

[video] 5:03 Femons. If this household wasn't at the centre of such a serious legal dispute, it would almost be comical. This is Lee the horse. Lee the horse, yeah. Hi, Lee. He would often just pop his head in. Yep. Come and say good morning. Despite the interruptions, the tour doesn't take long. There's only one other room. So this is the bedroom where we all sleep together. OK. I just turn the lights on. Again, we have LED lights in here running off the solar panel. Yep.

5:34 They all sleep together in one room. That's really good. That's good parenting because in nature, the parents and the children, everybody, they all stay together because it's also safer that way. It's not as if you would put your children somewhere else behind the trees you can sleep there alone that's impossible it would be super dangerous um yes plenty for our needs so it's very cozy yeah very cozy very cozy um we're very happy all sleeping together it must feel pretty quiet at the moment yeah right now it's yeah it's uh it just feels empty empty there's there's no laughter there's no joy there's no he's very calm under the circumstances Maybe it's because the camera team is there and because the children have been gone for a while, but still. Children.

[video] 6:30 Neither of you grew up off the grid, right? Yeah, but we camped. We were, you know, great campers. But it's different to like permanently living this way. So what drew you to this way of living? The base philosophy behind it for us is that the children are growing up in this environment where they have freedom with a boundary. You know, you wake up in the morning and do whatever you feel like doing. We don't have to run out the door to take the children to school. It's just a very relaxed way of waking up, eating breakfast together as a family and continuing through the day. So this was built by the children. Instead of school, Catherine and Nathan practise what they describe as parental education. Took a few logs and stuff that they found around and built themselves a little hut. Drawing inspiration from the Steiner system, which rejects early academics in favour of creativity.

[video] 7:17 So how would you teach them literature, mathematics? Okay, so they're already getting introduced to reading because since they're babies, they're getting read books every single night. Mathematics is just a standard. You know, you're always counting. You're always doing these things, especially when you're cooking, when you're building things, when they're helping daddy with the tools or building stuff. Alphabet.

7:32 It's interesting that she asks that because it's as if you need to learn that to survive. And that's sort of true in the slave system, but not outside of it. Why would you need to interpret the meaning of letters and numbers, which is what you do when you read and do maths? There's absolutely no reason to do that naturally.

[video] 7:58 ...is always in their minds with blocks, letters, numbers on the blocks and so forth. Do you not worry that by depriving them of a formal education... you're taking away choices for them later in life?

8:12 I love that question because... You would be sort of taking away these slave choices. The choice of... being able to work here or there, but do you actually want to work?

[video] 8:31 I've challenged myself on that question for years. We're actually giving them more opportunities in their future because they haven't been suppressed and confined to one limited form of thinking.

8:46 Very well said. One limited form of thinking. I like it.

[video] 8:52 A former chef spends his days keeping the place going, while Catherine, once a horse trainer, now runs a life coaching business. You're getting up because you want to do it. You want to go and let the animals out. You want to go and clean the stable. You want to go and get the vegetables. I mean, you do know that for most people, the idea of no flushing toilet, coffee machine, hot water is not particularly desirable. Do you know the flushing toilet is the least of the changes that we've made that would be more physical work. In fact, if anything, it's I don't have to clean the toilet. It's less work.

9:25 That's also something that wasn't even around not long ago. How is that even relevant?

[video] 9:32 ...have a compost toilet, a short walk from the house. It's just a bucket that gets filled up. And, you know, you do your number twos and just cover it with organic material. Yep. Through hay or leaves. Okay. And then presumably you empty it. I empty it to another area where it sits for a year and a half. Yep. And compost down. This will go onto the olive trees, fruit trees and olive trees.

9:59 It's crazy that they even bring this up as if it's somehow relevant, where you go to the toilet. Humans always used to go outside, simply nature. That's what you should be doing. It's good for the earth, for the plants, the trees.

[video] 10:16 Whereas the manure from the animals, that goes on to the vegetable patch. This might be an obvious question, but why use a compost toilet? Why do we use it? To save water. Yeah. How did the kids go with the compost toilet? Fine. That's all they know. No problem at all. But it's been a big problem for authorities and has attracted the ire of the local Italian community. So they're living a way that's really very unusual. It's really unusual because everyone in Italy at the most moment has a toilet. You know, we are famous. We have a toilet even out there.

10:46 Again, how is that relevant? Why are we talking about toilets? And they have a toilet. It's just different. But what does it matter in general?

[video] 10:59 Toilets are important. Toilets are very important. Claudio Giambene has been a reporter for 15 years, but he's never covered a case as bizarre as the family in the woods. So the first thing at the beginning was how these people couldn't have a toilet in their house because they remove the toilet in their house. And have the compost toilet. And they have the compost toilet because they always say...

11:23 They have a toilet. It's just different. But again, how is that even relevant? It's the same thing. We want to live off-grid.

[video] 11:33 That means washing in an old tub using rainwater. So this is where the kids wash? Well, they wash in there, but that will be inside the house. And you and Catherine? We do the same. We just stand in there and just do like a strip wash. Yeah, we don't have a shower. Why did you choose Italy to set up this lifestyle? You know, now when people ask me that question now, all I think is I just wish I'd never came here.

[video] 11:56 I chose Italy because, being from Melbourne, we've always grown up with Italians and I was drawn to Abruzzo because Abruzzo was still an area and a region of Italy that was still quite pure. It hadn't been overtaken by the modern world yet and the industrial revolution of everything. So it felt like a place you could live the way you wished? Absolutely. But they were wrong. Instead, it was an extreme bout of food poisoning that drew the eyes of the local police, the Carabinieri, in September 2024. We had been for a long time, for three years, picking edible mushrooms off our property. And honestly, we had just eaten too many in a few days. I made a really good sauce that day. And even the kids had three bowls. So we all ate. And how sick were you?

12:41 There's no such thing as edible mushrooms. There are some that you can tolerate, but mushrooms are not food for humans. It's what you would eat during famines.

[video] 12:54 and we were starting to get heat flushes and starting to sweat. And at that point, I was like, yeah, I called my neighbour to get an ambulance to our house. Isn't there a contradiction in that, though? Like, we're not going to connect to the power grid and pay taxes and do all those things, but we'll use your ambulances. We're not that closed off that we would not use hospitals. They must have been really concerned about the welfare of the children or how sick they were. No, it wasn't that. The Carabinieri called social services because they saw that we were living off grid.

[video] 13:21 A neighbor found them in a semi-conscious state, lying on the ground, and so called the police, the carabinieri, that is healthcare. So much so that a helicopter rescue also arrived. Local mayor, Giuseppe Masciulli, is used to dealing with all manner of town problems.

[video] 13:40 But nothing quite as extraordinary as this. While he feels for the family, he's adamant their way of life did not comply with Italian laws. In Italy, inside a home, there must be a toilet.

13:57 I love how they dubbed him with this Italian accent. In Italy, there must be a toilet in the home. In addition, the house had some damage.

[video] 14:11 According to the Carabinieri, it was not safe from a structural point of view. In that circumstance, it was noticed that the children did not attend school and did not practice homeschooling, which is a recognized private way of educating children in Italy, but were actually practicing unschooling, which is not recognized by Italian law. Authorities found your home to be inadequate, a dilapidated ruin without the necessary utilities. Yeah. I noticed that it's very red here. It could be a sunburn, I suppose, but it could also be eczema, no?

14:59 I'm not sure, but if they eat mushrooms, porridge, and all of this garbage, then maybe he messed up his gut. They should simply keep some animals, chickens, sheep, Those animals are easy to keep, and then you could be eating the animals.

[video] 15:21 I've always said to them, if you ever want to go into school, you go to school. They don't want to. Well, I think if I said to my nine-year-old daughter, you can choose, she'd probably choose to stay home and play.

15:34 Obviously, and that doesn't make you think? Why does nobody want to go to school?

[video] 15:42 All of that is way more useful than what you learn in school.

[video] 16:02 That's the opposite of the truth. Once you get educated, brainwashed,

16:23 you will believe that you should be working. And then you can choose between some kind of jobs, but you don't want to do any of that. You didn't even want to go to school in the first place.

[video] 16:38 Psychologist Sandy Ray works with families in difficult situations. While she hasn't met Catherine and Nathan, she's reviewed their living arrangements and the court documents and classifies their parenting style as laissez-faire. So laissez-faire parenting is parenting that's really actually child-driven, not adult-driven, essentially. So the children don't have to go to bed when they're asked to go to bed. They don't have to have baths when they don't want to have baths. They can eat and pick their food when they want to. And of course, if you're going back into mainstream society, rules and regulations

17:11 Right. They can do what they want to. And is that bad or what? What is she about to say?

[video] 17:20 Abided by and you get a lot of resistance. The research tends to indicate that they have poor self-regulation because it's my way. And if you tell me what to do, I'm going to have a hissy fit because I'm not.

17:33 Yes. Where else have we seen that? Oh, maybe in literally every wild animal because they are self-willed and they do what they want to do every day of their life, always. Nobody ever tells them what to do, except for technically their parents when they are small, but they don't tell them to go against their intuition. They just teach them how to survive. That's very different than what we do. We tell children and adults also, everybody nowadays, exactly what to do. You want to eat raw meat? No, no, no. Dangerous. Don't do that. Cook it or even better, eat a vegan or a vegetarian diet. Do you want to go out into the sun? No, no, no. The sun is dangerous. The most powerful... source of energy light in this reality is dangerous.

18:34 Ah, man. Exactly. She's all about accepting slavery.

18:44 She even promotes the slave mindset. Follow the rules. Don't do what you want to do. That's bad for society. And she's right. It is bad for society because it wouldn't work without rules.

[video] 19:00 Just the lack of formal education that concerned authorities. It was the parents' lack of cooperation. They refused to meet with social workers or participate in parenting support activities and wouldn't allow mandatory health checks. We did say yes to a lot of things, but we were not going to do things that were going to damage our children. But is that your putting your ideology first or your children first?

19:25 I wonder what she's talking about. They may have cut out that part. Because when I think about what the government sees as health, then I could imagine that they wanted to put something inside of them, right? Maybe. And they didn't want that. Fist.

[video] 19:48 It was during this time the case started to make national headlines. The whole country was mesmerized, watching and waiting to see how the saga would play out.

19:58 Yeah, people love drama because there's nothing going on in their lives.

[video] 20:04 Catherine is allowed to stay upstairs, but she's only supposed to see her daughters and son at mealtimes. Nathan gets just three visits a week.

20:16 As always, the father gets to see the children less. It's always like this nowadays. At least he gets to see them at all.

[video] 20:26 In the toughest time of my life, I feel like I'm out of control. I can't support my family right now. I can't help them. while the court decides if they can be returned to their parents. How are they coping? Oh, they're completely... They're scribbling on the walls. They've gone mad. The nightmares that my son wakes up with in horrific screams of terror. Mummy, help me. I'm scared. I'm scared.

20:52 There will be people... Of course, exactly, because it's insanely traumatic and it's absolutely insane that... People somehow believe that it's better for the children to remove them from the parents because they didn't have a proper toilet and because they didn't go to school to get brainwashed.

[video] 21:19 Watching, who will say, well, you've made your own bed. You have not taught these children. They've never had a sleepover. They've never gone to stay with other families. They don't know how to cope. Exactly. She understands it. I think that the reporter also does, but maybe she doesn't want to admit it.

21:54 There cannot be any excuse to do this. They were not abusing the children in any way. There was nothing going on.

22:07 It will always, always be worse for the children if they are not with the people that they love, with their parents, always. And if anybody believes that this was a good decision, that they are completely nuts. And the people who work for the government there are nuts, apparently.

[video] 22:27 Are you willing to meet every compromise to secure the release of your children? We already have agreed to every compromise. We've already done everything. I've had my kids jabbed with vaccines.

22:40 I know it.

[video] 22:41 Will you send them to school?

22:43 No.

[video] 22:44 So that's the deal breaker? Well, we've already agreed to a maestra, a teacher, that she's coming there to the kids every week. She's the old school teaching of, you know, that's no, that's wrong. Yes, that's right. Because you could homeschool, following a little bit more closely to the curriculum. There's a compromise there, isn't there? But my question is, why should we have to compromise to make other people feel comfortable? Whereas we've educated ourselves, researched ourselves, and we're doing what we feel is best for our children, yet we're not out there telling everybody else, well, you shouldn't be doing that with your child. There will be people watching who will think, gosh, if I was them, I would throw my beliefs out the window entirely to just get the kids back.

23:19 That's literally oppression.

[video] 23:24 It's not about that. Regardless of what we say yes to, they're showing us that We are right and you are wrong. We have the children. He says Italian audiences can't get enough of the drama and ratings have skyrocketed. What was it that was...

23:42 Yet none of them do anything about it. And who knows if any of them really even want to help them. I guess that a few people do.

[video] 23:51 I just feel empty inside, full of sadness and...

23:59 they don't deserve what's happening to them they don't deserve exactly they i would expect a man to feel rage more than sadness sadness also obviously had everything you could possibly give them in that place and all they want everything they say to his mummy i just want to go home and live like we lived before

[video] 24:24 The case is so unusual and so highly publicized that it's put the spotlight on how much freedom is too much when it comes to raising children.

24:34 How much freedom is too much? How can there be too much freedom?

24:42 And who is even free nowadays? Nobody around us is free.

[video] 24:49 You are at the mercy of the Italian system. This is why I wanted to make sure that the world is watching our kids. Because if anything happens, I want them to know who our children are. And there is a huge amount of love in the Italian person, and I am banking on that.

25:12 The Guardian writes, the deputy prime minister compared this case to a kidnapping. He compared it to a kidnapping, but it wasn't a kidnapping because those people worked for a company. They wore different clothes. And that's why Even though they kidnapped the children from the parents, it wasn't a kidnapping. But you can kind of maybe compare it to a kidnapping. Amazing logic. Just because some people wear different kinds of clothes and they work for the government, some imaginary companies which don't even exist, doesn't mean that they can kidnap your children. Of course, they won't call it kidnapping because they don't want the oppressed ones to understand what's going on.

26:09 That's why they will also not call it stealing when they will confiscate your camera, for example, which is what happened to me in London. And they never gave it back to me.

26:25 When they raid your home, then they will call it executing a warrant. They will always call it something else. They just removed the children from the parents. They didn't kidnap them. Why would you say that? They work for a non-existent company. They cannot kidnap children. They literally physically took them away from the parents, but that's not kidnapping. They are in that little prison now. They cannot get out of there because they physically forced them to stay there. But no, they are not enslaved there. Not at all. They have these nightmares every night because they love being away from their parents. They...

27:18 grew up with them, the mother gave birth to them, and now they simply remove them from the parents in a loving way because you live in a free society, you can do whatever you want to, and the system is there to help you and protect you. Yes, go on living in your fucking delusional world, you fucking moron. Thanks for watching.