Word: stockholm
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...breakdown, spending several weeks in a Melbourne hospital. Hospital staff never investigated her living situation. In the incident that led her to finally file a restraining order against her father, state authorities fined the victim for damage she caused to the government housing unit that she fled. (Read about Stockholm Syndrome...
Baffling it may be, but Dugard's response to her years in captivity is hardly unusual. Explaining it precisely is impossible, but one of the most common theories is the so-called Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which victims display compassion for and even loyalty to their captors. It was first widely recognized after the Swedish bank robbery that gave it its name. For six days in August 1973, thieves Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson held four Stockholm bank employees hostage at gunpoint in a vault. When the victims were released, their reaction shocked the world: they hugged...
...widely accepted diagnostic criteria exist to identify Stockholm syndrome - also known as terror-bonding or traumatic bonding - and critics insist its apparent prevalence is largely a figment of the media's overactive imagination. One FBI report called such close victim-captor relationships "overemphasized, overanalyzed, overpsychologized and overpublicized." Nonetheless, the Swedish clerks' puzzling response to their ordeal has been emulated over and over again in a series of high-profile cases. When heiress Patty Hearst was abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, for example, she famously became their accomplice, adopting an assumed name and abetting the radical political group...
...Kampusch said in a 2007 documentary intended to mark her first year of freedom, calling Priklopil a "poor soul - lost and misguided." (Experts note that because they are especially vulnerable and impressionable, children may be particularly prone to forming bonds with their captors, a phenomenon that may differ from Stockholm syndrome in adults.) Victims generally stand a good chance of recovering from Stockholm syndrome, mental-health experts say, but the prognosis and road to recovery depend on the nature and intensity of the hostage situation and the victim's individual way of coping...
...critics of Stockholm syndrome maintain, these captives were the exceptions. According to a 2007 FBI report, 73% of victims displayed no signs of such affection for their abductors. Nonetheless, crisis negotiators often actually try to encourage captor-hostage bonding by telling perpetrators about the victims' families or personal lives. Being viewed as a fellow human being, the theory goes, may be a victim's best hope for staying alive. Which means Dugard's apparent reluctance to attempt an escape may ultimately have been her ticket to freedom...