The goal of ABP World Group international child recovery services is to locate, negotiate and recover your missing child.
We can dispatch personnel to most locations in the world; we specialize in locating missing children up to ages 18.
A Place To Start
A Place to Start, consults with parents of parentally abducted children and assists in making choices to help bring your child home while protecting your financial future from fraud.
ABP World Group Ltd. Web site
We are aware that parental child abduction can be difficult to resolve, but through the use of professional operatives with the skills and expertise necessary we work to find a resolution. We are here to help you.
Child Recovery Services
Our intelligence and investigative capabilities combined with our ability to dispatch personnel to most locations in the world offer a safe and strategic solution to protecting what is most important to you : your child.
Forum for menn og omsorg
Tema vedr. fedres rettsstilling, foreldrepermisjon og ulike barnelovsspørsmål
The Japan Children`s Rights Network
Our Mission is to to disseminate information to help change attitudes and laws in Japan in order to assure all children of frequent, meaningful and continuing contact with both natural parents, regardless of citizenship, marital status or gender.
In the context of Thailand family law, child abduction cases typically occur during a child custody dispute, when one parent flees a legal jurisdiction with any children who are the subjects of the dispute. International law and Thailand family law may come into play when a child is abducted from a foreign country and taken to Thailand, when a child is taken from Thailand to a foreign country, or when a child is abducted by a parent within Thailand.
What should I do if my child is abducted and taken to Thailand?
The first thing a parent must do if a child has been abducted and taken to Thailand is to contact legal authorities, their embassy in Thailand, and an attorney who can help put you in touch with family law attorneys in Thailand.
Can the Hague Convention on Child Abduction be used in Thailand?
The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction provides a procedure for parents who have had their children abducted by the other parent. The Hague Treaty on Child Abduction is executed through the governments of treaty member countries, but normally requires an attorney to file the appropriate documents with the government authority responsible for the retrieval of the child.
Thailand has formally acceded to the convention; however, at this time the proper procedures for acting upon the convention have not been codified into Thai law. This means that the convention, like a variety of other Thai legal subjects, falls into the “grey area” of Thailand law. For this reason, parents are encouraged to pursue their cases in the Thailand courts in the procedure outlined below.
What is the procedure for retrieving a child who has been taken to Thailand?
There is a great deal of misinformation stating that parental abduction in Thailand is not considered a crime under Thai law, and cannot be prosecuted. This is technically not true.
In order to retrieve a child that has been abducted by a parent in Thailand, the parent who is seeking the return of the child must seek full custody of the child in Thailand Family Courts. Once full custody has been obtained, a parent may use the Courts to issue a demand that the abducting parent attend Thai Court and return the child.
SEAN’S saga ticks all the boxes. There’s romance and heartache to rival anything served up by Hugh Grant, espionage worthy of a John Le Carre novel and a daring rescue that Sly Stallone would be proud of.
The book of Sean Felton’s mission to save then three-year-old Jobe, entitled Scared of the Dark, is to be released on both sides of the Atlantic next month.
But already Hollywood moguls are now vying to turn the tale into a cinema success.
Sean wants the financial rewards of a best-seller, not for himself but for the anonymous businessman who ploughed a small fortune into the £80,000 cost of getting Jobe back into Britain.
“I won’t reveal his name,” said the 40-year-old, “but he has been like a father to me. I can never repay him, but, hopefully, this will go some way towards it.”
Sean’s world fell apart on March 26, 2010, when he returned to his neat Norton Canes home in Staffordshire to discover wife Kim – married after a whirlwind romance in Thailand – and Jobe had vanished. A laughing Kim called three days later to inform him she’d spirited their child to Thailand.
The painter and decorator succeeded, where CID, his own MP, Interpol and even the Foreign Office had failed, in tracking them down by posing as an American playboy.
Kim, 31, was wooed on Facebook by the fictitious ‘Matt Young’, pictures of his Ferrari and promises of cash.
Sean had to grease palms and brave bandits before confronting the pair in the squalid village of Chiang Rai, close to the Vietnamese border and at the heart of the narcotics freeway known as the Golden Triangle, where poppy crops, not English pounds, are the currency that counts.
Kim handed back the traumatised child for £1,000, ownership of a parcel of land in Thailand that Sean has purchased for more than £6,000, a laptop and agreement by the British Embassy she wouldn’t face prosecution in this country.
Watching the child yesterday playing boisterously with his Christmas presents – doting Dad beaming in the background – it’s hard to comprehend the ordeal he endured during six months hidden in the depths of a Thai jungle.
When Sean located Jobe, he was cowering in the corner of a hut on stilts, gnawing hungrily on an apple.
“I will never forget it,” recalled Sean, clearly shaken by the painful memory. “He had no eyes – they were, like, soulless. He was undernourished. His thumbnails had been ripped off and his teeth were chipped. I picked him up. He couldn’t speak. He was scared to death.
“He didn’t speak English – he had been that traumatised, it was just gibberish. You’ve got to remember, this is a child who had been spoilt to death. For him to be picked up and taken to Thailand – a totally different culture, totally different food – must have been devastating.
“For the first three months when I brought him back we slept together on the settee. He was scared of the monsters, he was scared of everything.
“He does still remember and we talk about his mother. We’ve got to the stage where we can talk about the difficult questions.”
Sean’s story is a salutary lesson to Englishmen of a certain age whose heads are turned by the fluttering lashes and pouts of beautiful Thai women half their age. Some of those bar girls are looking for something – and, more often than not, it isn’t love. Sean admits: “I was a fool – my own MP called me a fool. She conned me from the beginning. I think I was a customer in her eyes. She looked on the whole situation as a business. I thought I was being smart. The courtship was brilliant, it was one-in-a-million and I will probably never experience anything like it again.
“She copped me at the bar, next thing we were married, which was my doing. It was just a means of getting full British citizenship.”
He is adamant, however, that he didn’t travel to Thailand for the first time in 2004 looking for love.
Unlike mates who wanted to down lager at the bar, Sean wanted to visit tourist hotspots – and Kim, a stunning bar-worker at the Pattaya hotel, was more than willing to help. “It was the best holiday I ever had and, obviously, I had feelings for her.”
Sean was so smitten he returned three weeks later. “We went to Samui Island. That was paradise and as cheap as chips. I was living a life of luxury for next to nothing. At the end of the three weeks I proposed.
“People may say it happened too quickly, but it happens every day all over the world. If you meet someone you want to be with you do pop the question.”
The couple married on New Year’s Day, 2006, in Kim’s ramshackle village of Udon Thani.
Romance was painfully short. The doting Thai bride became moody and detached soon after arriving in Britain four months later. “She changed so much from the holiday romance to reality.”
And the scattered jigsaw pieces of her past slowly came together. Sean said: “Kim was crying in the bathroom, I thought she was homesick. She said she had something to show me. A finger on her right hand had been cut off from the knuckle. She said it was an accident while operating a rice machine, but the injury wasn’t new – she must’ve kept it from me. I found that frightening and found out later that can be the Thai punishment for stealing.”
He claims she later confessed to links with the burgeoning sex industry in her own country.
Sean tried to win back his wife with cash. Kim, now pregnant, protested their apartment was too small, so they rented a property while Sean purchased and renovated a Norton Canes home.
She wanted him to buy three-and-a-half acres in Thailand. He did. She spent nights out with fellow Thai brides. “No matter what you did for Kim, she was not happy,” he shrugged. “I would come, in there would be a houseful of Thai girls all eating. I always got the impression it was them and me. I was kidding myself, trying to still be the happy family. I had gone through a divorce before, when I was a kid, and didn’t want that.
“2009 was a hell of a year. She kept going out and was coming back at all hours. It was an unreal situation. She could be nice one minute and turn on you with the flip of a coin. She wouldn’t speak but, really, the only time she showed her temper was when I told her I wanted a divorce.
“She wanted me to pay for British citizenship and I said, ‘no way’. I was wiped out.”
It was then, Sean believes, his wife hatched the plot to take their child.
And he almost lost the lad forever.
With weeks gone and assorted agencies plus a private detective drawing a blank, Sean tripped by chance on to Kim’s Facebook account.
He posed as a rich American and became cyber friends with two Frenchmen she was pictured embracing. They gave away her location.
Thai police, bolstered by promises of booze and food, helped Sean find his family in Chiang Rai.
Sean has heard nothing from Kim since returning with their son – and that’s they way he wants it. “Yes, I am bitter. We’re still not divorced – I can’t afford it. I’m a full-time dad which is very, very hard financially.”
The holiday dream that turned into hell on earth cost Sean a successful business, his wealth and almost his sanity. But he has his precious son back.
He’s working on a second book, chronicling Jobe’s rehabilitation, and setting up a charity helping parents enduring the same plight – Abducted Angels.
Sean is also a lot wiser after learning a painful and costly lesson. To borrow from a well worn Trading Standards motto: if a tourist’s whirlwind romance in Thailand seems too good to be true… it probably is.
PHUKET: Figures show the number of British children abducted by a parent and taken abroad is increasing, with Thailand a favored destination. Pakistan and India rank first and third in numerical terms, sandwiching Thailand. The Foreign Office said that 161 children had been taken over the past 12 months to countries that are outside an international treaty designed to ensure the return of wrongfully removed minors.
On Phuket, parental abduction is known to be an issue. The most prominent case has been the twice-abducted Ricardo Choosaneh, a nine-year-old first taken by his Thai mother from his father in the Netherlands, then taken from Phuket by his foster mother earlier this year. His mother, Sumetra Choosaneh, told Phuketwan in an interview in Bangkok in March that she planned to go to Europe to regain her boy – but through the courts this time.
Khun Sumetra and her family say that the father has never been a good provider and continues to use possession of the boy as a means to extract money from others and to gain government housing in the Netherlands. Britain’s Foreign Office admitted that true figures on abductions are likely to be much higher because many cases go unreported. AFP reported that although Pakistan, Thailand and India topped the list of nations involved, there were cases in another 94 countries that are outside the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne told the news agency: ”Finding a solution can be especially difficult if a child has been taken to a non-Hague country as there are no international systems in place to help you. This is why prevention is so important.” The Phuket case of young Ricardo has brought international attention, with a television show in the Netherlands encouraging support from viewers for the boy’s father, Michael Roland van Alphen. However, Khun Sumetra and her family maintain that Phuket-born Ricardo, abducted twice in the space of nine months, should never have been snatched on the second occasion by foster mother Kimberley Ching-Yong because the boy’s future is brighter on Phuket.
Only a court, having listened carefully to both sides, can settle the matter with the best interests of the child to the fore. As Sharon Cooke, advice line manager for Reunite International Child Abduction Centre, told AFP: ”The psychological impact on children can be traumatic and for the left-behind parent, the shock and loss are unbearable, particularly if they don’t know where their child is.”
