Even after he was reunited with his father a decade ago, it took Sean Goldman a week and a half before he could call him “dad.” And even then, it was only because he had accidentally fallen into a frigid lake near his Tinton Falls home — and screamed out to his father in terror.

Spirited away to Brazil by his mother in 2004, Sean says he was fed lies about his father, David. The elder Goldman had flown to Brazil more than a dozen times to reclaim his son, who was four when his mother left the United States.

“As a young child, you don’t fully understand what’s going on because no one is really telling you exactly what’s going on,” Sean Goldman, now 19, said during a press conference Thursday. “As I got older, I was able to see what happened and how they tried to skew my perception. It’s crazy what people will do just to win.”

Sean, who was returned to the United States in 2009, recently graduated from Holmdel High School. He is attending Brookdale Community College, where he plans to major in political science.

“I guess you guys can guess why,” he said with a smile.

Thursday marked the five year anniversary of the signing of “The Goldman Act,” a piece of legislation U.S. Rep. Chris Smith sponsored to help prevent international parental child abduction. Smith, R-4th Dist., called a press conference in downtown Red Bank where he was joined by Sean and David Goldman, whose five-year, multi-continental custody battle, captivated the nation’s attention.

The congressman touted the bill’s achievements — a reduction in child abduction cases — but also highlighted its shortcomings.

“Much remains to be done, especially in the realm of utilizing all the tools, including serious sanctions, against offending countries that are embedded into the Goldman Act,” Smith said. “They need to be robustly applied. To date, they have not been by either the Obama administration or by the Trump administration.”

In 2004, Sean Goldman was taken to Brazil by his mother, Bruna Bianchi, on what was supposed to be a two-week vacation to her native country. Days later, Bianchi told David Goldman the marriage was over, and that she planned to stay in Brazil with Sean. She divorced Goldman in Brazil and eventually remarried, but died in 2008 in childbirth.

Bianchi’s parents and her second husband had fought to keep the boy in Brazil.

On Christmas Eve in 2009, a federal regional court in Brazil, where Sean Goldman had been living with his grandparents, ordered the child returned to his father. Sean and his father flew back to the United States on a plane chartered by NBC News, which the Society of Professional Journalists called at the time an example of “checkbook journalism.”

The Sean and David Goldman International Child Abduction Prevention and Return Act of 2014 created an annual report that maintains statistics on international child abductions and created sanctions for non-complaint countries. India is one of the worst offenders, Smith said. In 2018, he said, seven New Jersey children were abducted to India.

Ravi Parmar, 41, of Manalapan, hasn’t seen his 10-year-old son, Reyansh, since his mother took the child to India in 2012.

It’s especially hard for parents in his position to get help, Parmar said, because authorities view these cases as family quarrels.

“I had to call the F.B.I. for three months every week before someone actually responded to my request,” Parmar said. “And then when they did call, the officers would say, ‘Sir, your child hasn’t been abducted, he’s with his mother.’

“My story is not unique,” he continued. “A lot of parents around the country have the same issue.”

David Goldman, 53, is aware of that, he said, and that’s why he’s taken it upon himself to comfort hopeless parents.

When Sean returned home, Goldman said he didn’t taint his son’s mind with negative opinions of his ex-wife’s family. He said he let his son see for himself the love he had back in the United States.

“Over time he just saw,” Goldman said. “He came home on Christmas Eve. He wasn’t just New Jersey’s child. He was America’s child.”