reading

Here is my report on another article which caught my attention in Marie Claire's May edition.

It is about people who had been kidnapped at some stage in their lives and the question if they all had suffered from the infamous Stockholm syndrome.

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted people, where the kidnapped people show affection for the person who has abducted them.

The name of the syndrom was coined by the psychologist and criminologist Nils Bejerot after a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. Three female and one male employee were held for six days and identified so strongly with their captors that they later raised money to defend them.

Back to the article. It features stories of people who have been kidnapped and then tortured, sexually harassed, and treathened with death. If they are lucky to flee from the nightmare they were in, the first question put forward to them is why they didn't try to escape sooner.

The thing is that the public is only aware of the kidnapping and the reappearance of the kidnapped person. What happens in between the public doesn't know. Victims are usually brainwashed, constantly in fear of being killed and it is only natural that their basic instinct in such a situation is to survive. As they cannot just walk away from their kidnapper, they develop mechanism the public cannot understand.

Another thing all the victims have in common is that their life will never be the same. For the public the kidnapping is just another news story which will soon become water under the bridge, but the victims have to cope with what happened to them. Many of them are accordingly sucked into a vortex of alcohol or drugs abuse.

This article immensely saddened me. I cannot imagine that anyone could know how it is to be kidnapped and survive such an ordeal. It is only normal that the victim is ineradicably changed and has great difficulties in trusting another person ever again.
Sometimes I ask myself if it is not better to die than to survive a kidnapping knowing that what awaits you is a life full of psychic problems.