Single parents separated from their former partners are allegedly turning to controversial “recovery agencies” to get their children back from former spouses that take them abroad without permission.

Normally, when parents separate, custody of the children is settled by a judge, along with visitation hours and rules, but sometimes one party doesn’t want to play by the rules, and that’s where agencies specialized in child retrieval come in. Most operators of such controversial services claim they are an essential tools for desperate parents with no other means of retrieving their beloved children from dangerous situations, but some sources claim that that isn’t always the case. Some recovery agencies allegedly don’t put in the time and effort to objectively research cases, and downright kidnap kids for parents, even if they don’t have custody rights.

Louise Screene (pseudonym, to protect her identity), recently told Mail Online the shocking story of how she saw her two children kidnapped from arm’s length by a recovery agent paid by their father. Following her divorce from Andrew (not his real name), Louise agreed to share custody of their two children, even if that meant they had to travel between the UK and the Middle East, where Andrew had moved.

Read More »

Platonic or elective co-parenting is a new way of having and raising children which involves two people conceiving (naturally or artificially) and taking joint physical, financial and emotional responsibility for raising them, but without being romantically involved.

Whether it’s because they want to raise a child without being involved in a romantic relationship, or because they feel like their biological clock is ticking and they haven’t yet found Mr. or Mrs. Right, a growing number of people are turning to specialized websites like PollenTree or Modamily to find likeminded people to raise children with without any romantic strings attached. The rising popularity of platonic co-parenting is seen by experts as a consequence of many people’s realization that the person you have kids with doesn’t be the person you grow old with, or even someone you live with.

Read More »

A 41-year-old qualified solicitor recently took his wealthy parents to court in an attempt to force them to continue financially supporting him indefinitely.

The London-based man, who has not been identified claimed that his parents had knowingly been nurturing his dependence on them for the last 20 years, only to recently ‘significantly reduce’ their financial support, after their relationship deteriorated. He wanted a judge to rule that his parents should continue supporting him, and his lawyers cited laws relating to marriage and children during a remote family court hearing. Interestingly, the 41-year-old unemployed lawyer is currently living rent-free in a central London apartment owned by his parents. They have also been paying all his utility bills as well, but apparently that’s just not good enough…

Read More »

A 30-year-old Mexican man allegedly reported his own mother to the authorities for kicking him out of the house, because he didn’t want to get a job or at least help with chores.

Last Wednesday, Mexican media reported the case of one Christian Uriel, a 30-year-old man who denounced his own mother and aunt to the before the Mexican Prosecutor’s Office, accusing them of assault and harassments. The young man claimed that he was beaten out of the house by the two women, who also threw water on him. What he failed to tell the authorities was that he had been living at his mother’s house for months, free of charge, without contributing to the family budget or even helping out with chores.

Read More »

A 51-year-old Ukrainian woman was recently arrested after it was discovered that she had been digging an underground tunnel near the walls of a prison, with the intention of helping her convicted son to escape.

The unnamed woman reportedly hails from the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev and had rented a house near the prison where her son was serving a life sentence for murder. Every night, she drove a silent electric scooter to an empty field near the Zaporizhia maximum security prison and used rudimentary tools to dig a 10-foot-deep tunnel toward the penal colony. She worked only during the night, using an improvised trolley to take the dirt out of the narrow tunnel. She had been working for at least three weeks and had almost reached the prison walls when she was discovered and arrested.

Read More »

An 84-year-old retired farmer from Melbourne, Australia, has been trying to get his own daughter evicted from his apartment for eight years, but despite spending a small fortune on legal fees, he has been unsuccessful.

Peter Grundy, a retired wheat farmer from the Australian state of Victoria, has been trying to sell his apartment so he can move into a retirement home. He isn’t entitled to a pension, so in order to secure his place there he needs to pay up front, but in order to do that he has to sell the apartment. The only problem is Peter has been trying to do just that for the last eight years, only his 49-year-old daughter, Katrina, has been doing everything in her power to stop him. Despite his best efforts to get her evicted from his property, including taking her to court, Katrina hasn’t budged and legal experts say the pensioner has exhausted all legal options.

Read More »

Russian media recently reported the shocking case of a 42-year-old woman who had not set foot outside her family home for 26 years, despite being in perfect health, because he mother didn’t allow it.

Until this month, 42-year-old Nadezhda Bushueva hadn’t left her mother’s house in the village of Arefinsky, in western Russia, since she was 16. The only reason she decided to venture into the village was because her mother, Tatyana, had become ill and needed to be hospitalized. For the first time in 26 years she didn’t have to listen to her mother, who reportedly kept her isolated for all these years to “protect her from the dangers of the outside world”. Nadezhda had reportedly not washed her hair in 12 years, as evidenced by the giant clump on her head, and hadn’t had a change of clothes in even longer. Despite all this, she allegedly said she doesn’t need any help…

According to the women’s neighbors, Tayana had always been very protective of her daughter, but things really got out of control when the woman retired. Nadezhda was in 8th grade when her mother started forbidding her from going out with other teenagers in the village, and in a couple of years the two had become complete recluses. Nadezhda didn’t go to school anymore, and her mother rejected anyone who tried to interfere, telling them that they were fine and that they should mind their own business.

Read More »

A grandmother from the Netherlands was recently ordered to delete her grandchildren’s photos from Facebook and Pinterest, after her own daughter sued her for posting the pics without her legal consent.

According to the European Union’s GDPR directive photos of children up to the age of 16 can only be posted online with the consent of their parents, and one Dutch mother didn’t stop shy of taking her own mother to court for refusing to remove photos of her grandchildren from her social media profiles. Apparently, the grandmother sued after repeatedly refusing to delete pictures of her three grandchildren, aged 14, 6 and 5. She and her daughter had reportedly stopped talking a year ago because of this seemingly insignificant issue.

Read More »

An elderly couple from China’s Henan province took legal action against their own son for neglecting his duty of financially supporting them.

Filial piety isn’t that important of a notion in the Western world, but in China it’s a big deal. Failing to take care of your elderly parents is actually considered a legal offense both in China and in other countries with large Chinese communities, like Singapore or Taiwan. It’s actually not uncommon for parents to sue their offspring for neglecting them in their old age, and while most reconcile their differences before having punitive measures enforced, some don’t and police, revenue service and banks have to get involved. Such was the case of an elderly couple whose son flat out refused to support them even after being ordered to by a judge.

Read More »

A Spanish man risks spending the next two years in prison for opening a letter addressed to his 10-year-old son and using it as evidence in a trial against the boy’s mother.

In a hearing held on Wednesday in the Spanish city of Seville, a father was accused by the prosecution of violating his child’s privacy by opening a letter addressed to him, which he was not authorized to do. The letter had been sent by the boy’s maternal aunt, and in it he was told how he should testify against his father in a 2012 domestic abuse case brought against the defendant by his own wife, the boy’s mother. The child’s aunt reportedly also insulted his father in the letter, which was then used by the defendant in court to prove that his wife’s family had coerced his son to testify against him. He was acquitted in that case, but now faces a two-year prison sentence and financial compensation for violating private correspondence.

Read More »

An independent candidate from the Indian state of Punjab managed to make himself known around the world after a video of him crying and telling a reporter that he only received 5 votes in the recent Indian general elections despite having 9 family members went viral on social media.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a resounding victory in India’s general elections, which ended last week after some 600 million people across the country cast their vote. But another important thing happened: Neetu Shutteran Wala, a relatively unknown politician who ran as independent in the city of Jalandhar, had a meteoric rise to meme status. In an interview with a local reporter, Shutteran Wala broke down in tears as he revealed that despite having nine family members, he had only received five votes. Asked if that meant that not even his family voted for him, the emotional politician said that he doesn’t blame his relatives, but election fraud.

Read More »

A Chinese polygamist who was secretly married to three women managed to keep them from finding out about each other despite arranging for them to live within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

The 36-year-old man, surnamed Zhang, is facing up to two years in prison for polygamy, after he exploited a loophole in the system to legally marry three different women in a period of three years. He worked as a real-estate agent in Kunshan, eastern China’s Jiangsu province, and made a lot of money thanks to the country’s booming property market, so providing for three different families was no problem, but he admitted that traveling between three homes up to 10 times a week could be a bit tiring. Not as tiring as it could have been, though, as Zhang made sure to buy the three women apartments within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

Read More »

An Indian woman and her four daughters have confessed to hiring contract killers to have their husband/father murdered because he refused to let them wear jeans.

The lifeless body of Meharbaan Ali, a police sub-inspector, was found in a sewage canal in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, just 250 meters from his home, on Sunday. An investigation began and it didn’t take long for local police to figure out that the man’s family may have been involved in his murder. Circuit cameras installed in the area and a thorough verification of each family member’s call history helped inspectors crack the case and ultimately get a confession out of the wife and her four daughters.

Read More »

A 24-year-old man from Southampton, England, was banned from contacting his parents for five years after they got so fed up with his constant pestering for money that they got a restraining order against him.

A restraining order was issued against Matthew Kerley last year by the Crown Prosecution Service, after his parents complained that his constant begging for money had caused them extreme anxiety and stress. He was also jailed for 32 weeks on charges of harassment, but continued to contact his mother and father after that, despite the restraining order preventing him from doing that for five years. For example, last month, he called his parents for money over 30 times in 24 hours, with some of the calls being made in the middle of the night.

Read More »

A Moroccan man recently filed a lawsuit against his wife, accusing her of adultery. After undergoing a routine health checkup , the man allegedly learned that he had been sterile for most of his life, so he couldn’t possibly have fathered any of their nine children.

The man, a professor in the small Moroccan city of Sidi Slimane, reportedly had his whole world turned upside down by an urologist, following a routine checkup. He apparently had a small cyst on his right testicle, which he told the doctor had been there for as long as he could remember. The physician decided to run some tests, and while the results showed that the cyst was not life-threatening, they also showed that its presence rendered the unnamed man sterile. The only problem was that he had been happily married to his wife for 35 years, and was supposed to have fathered 9 children during that time.

Read More »