4 Underground Networks for Abused Kids Reported

About 200 children who claim they have been abused by a parent vanish every year into organized undergrounds, to be disguised and sheltered by strangers who risk arrest to keep them safe, two newspapers reported Sunday.

Four underground networks have emerged over the last decade: two in the South, one in the Northeast and one in the West, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Blade of Toledo, Ohio. The four operate independently of one another and, except for one, are very secretive.

In many cases the children and, often, the mother flee when a judge grants custody to the father after authorities reject allegations that the father had sexually abused the children. Mothers and children feel they have no place to turn, so they defy court orders, said the newspapers in a joint report.

Only a small percentage of contested custody cases involve sexual abuse allegations. A 1988 study by the Denver-based Center for Policy Research involving 9,000 contested custody cases found that sexual abuse allegations were made in 169 of them, or less than 2%.

Overall, at least 140,000 reports of child sexual abuse are substantiated in the United States each year, most of them in families, according to a 1994 report by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the newspapers said.

When a woman and her children enter one of the undergrounds, they agree to assume new identities and disguises and leave at a moment’s notice. The children often miss school and sometimes suffer emotional and psychological trauma.

Amanda Otter, 14, has gone underground twice. At the age of 4, suffering from genital warts, she disappeared with her mother, April Meyer. They were found four years later in upstate New York.

It is uncertain whether Amanda was sexually abused by her father, Brian Otter.

Otter claims Meyer did her best “to convince Amanda she was abused and molested as a child.” He says Amanda was happy for the three months in 1996 that she lived with his new family in Yucaipa, Calif., when he regained custody.

Meyer believes her daughter was abused.

In January, Amanda entered the underground alone, saying her father threatened to put her in a mental hospital if she didn’t stop complaining about him.