I appeared on CNN's "
Anderson Cooper 360" last night and the topic touches all of us--abducted children.
Two boys, one a teen and the other several years younger, were abducted by someone who everyone thought was a quiet, responsible employee who worked two jobs. There was no reason to believe anything about him. He kept to himself, worked at the same job for 25 years and never had a problem outside of a traffic ticket. The one mistake he made in this bizarre case was that he took a sick day on the day Ben Ownby went missing. Of course, there was also the fact that two police officers found his behavior odd when they spoke to him on an unrelated matter. The rest is history.
Looking for one boy, the authorities found two and the first boy, Shawn Hornbeck, had been missing for four years. Everyone asked themselves how this could have happened. How could a boy be missing in plain sight of the community?
Some people are speculating that it's an example of
Stockholm Syndrome, but that's trying to fit this neatly into a simple answer. In the first place, the people in the Syndrome case were adult bank customers held for several days in the bank and, in the second, it just doesn't happen that victims of kidnapping identify with their captors. A study of 1200 kidnapped persons by the FBI found that 92% did not exhibit the features of the Syndrome. Experts, in fact, find it to be a rare, rather than a common phenomena.
Now that the boys are safe, there is much to be mended in their lives as they are woven into the fabric of their lives, lives that have a rent in them. The process will take time and one thing I, as a psychologist, do not want the media exploring is what these kids went through during the captivity. This is a highly personal matter and not one for public discussion or knowledge. It's going to be difficult enough for them in their families, their communities and at school.
The one question that many may be asking is why this man, with one boy sitting in his apartment, would abduct another. For some individuals like this man, it has to do with preference for children between a particular age range and the older boy may have "aged out" for him. I've seen it in families where
incest was prevalent. When the abused child reached 15, the age of puberty, the abuser selected a younger child to take this child place. During the year or two prior to reaching 15, the child would be told that the only way to protect their younger sibling was to comply with the wishes of the abuser.
Why did this boy stay? Probably for the same reason abused women say in abusive relationships--they lose their will to escape or they fear that they will be killed. I can only think it was similar for this young man.
Related Topics: Technorati Tags: Ben Ownby, Shawn Hornbeck, child abduction, news, Stockholm Syndrome 
