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Victims identify with captors for their own security
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Risto Vahanen writes out answers to journalist Rauli Virtanen's questions |
Risto Vahanen's understanding and kind words about those holding the 21 hostages in the Philippine jungle can be a sign of something that has come to be known as the Stockholm Syndrome: the captive identifies with his captors. The terms has its roots in a bank robbery that took place in the Swedish capital in August 1973. The heist by all accounts went wrong, with the upshot being that four bank employees were taken hostage by the robbers and held for six days. To the extreme puzzlement of outsiders, members of the group grew attached to the robbers, resisted efforts at rescue, and defended their captors. Two of the three women in the group actually became engaged to the captors.
- “The possibility that one will identify with the captor is a possibility, but not a hard and fast rule”, argues Jouko Lönnqvist, a psychiatrist and professor at the National Public Health Institute.
- Lönnqvist says that the victim's “bonding” with the captor(s) is not a conscious process so much as something that happens more or less of itself. “From the perspective of one's own safety it is natural that one feels happier about being cooped up with someone who is not a threat, but really a fellow-victim. It is easier to go on with a partner rather than with an enemy.”
- Lasse Nurmi, a psychologist at the Police College of Finland, takes the view that Stockholm Syndrome is intrinsically a good phenomenon, since it has a life-preserving significance. “When one becomes bonded with those who have done the hostage-taking, there is an interaction and a coming-together on the human level. It is difficult to kill someone with whom one has developed even the most rudimentary contact of this kind”, says Nurmi.
- Nurmi regards it as a good sign that the kidnappers have permitted the maintaining of contact between the captives and the outside world. “Any contact of this kind that is allowed is a mark of progress”, he says.
BBC: How hostages cope
Stockholm Syndrome - from an article on “Societal Stockholm Syndrome” in the context of self-destructive behaviour amongst women involved with no-good or violent male partners.
Perhaps the most famous early example of Stockholm Syndrome was the celebrated case of Patty Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (a left-wing radical cadre) in 1974. Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of the newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst, reportedly identified so strongly with her captors that she appeared to have become one of their number, and she was famously photographed carrying a semi-automatic rifle as “Tania”in an SLA bank raid in San Francisco some months later.
Notes from the Philippine jungle - a hostage account
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 12.5.2000 |
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