They flee their husbands to protect their children

Last year, in the United States, one and a half million child sexual abuse cases were filed. Only 4% of them led to an indictment. Today, 3,000 mothers and their children are hiding, outside the law. They fled, disowned by the courts after accusing their husbands of sexually abusing their children. They left their parents, their friends, their jobs, their homes, to join an underground network that helps them and trains them for their life as fugitives, teaches them how to change their appearance, how to obtain new identity papers, fake birth certificates, how to start their lives over from scratch... But by hiding their children, the women are accused of "parental kidnapping". They are all wanted by the federal police. And those who are arrested are, for the most part, sentenced to several years in prison. We met these imprisoned women, we followed these mothers and children on the run, we tried to understand this infernal spiral.
Prix du Grand Reportage des magazines d'actualité 1996
Director: Jean Xavier de Lestrade