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https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/old-town-in-
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Stockholm Syndrome never really happened, at least not how they described it to us. A little background here... Back in 1973, in Stockholm, a convict on parole, Jan Erik Olsson, attempted to rob a bank with a gun. He took four bank employees as hostages. He held the hostages for six days in the bank vault, demanding that the police release his friend, a celebrity criminal, Clark Olofson, from behind bars, some money and free passage. The police did not budge, but they managed to smoke them out by drilling a hole through the vault and infusing noxious gas inside. The puzzling thing throughout the whole fiasco was that the hostages were said to have sided with the assailant. They viewed the police as the bad guys and did not take the opportunity to escape when the police purposely laid the plan for them. It is said that the hostages later crowdsourced funds for the robber's trial. It was later revealed that all these were fabricated. There was even a rumour that one of the hostages was engaged to her captor. The most apparent thing was that none of the media people interviewed the hostages to get a first-hand account of what transpired in the bank. Unverified rumours started flying. Soon, the understanding was that the hostages were brainwashed. In Sweden, pretty soon, the act of hostages building psychological bonds with their kidnappers was labelled Norrmalmstorgssyndromet, after Norrmalmstorg Square, where the attempted robbery took place.
Outside, this phenomenon was recognised as Stockholm Syndrome. Policemen at academies were taught to take note of this when handling a hostage situation. Hostages cannot be relied upon to cooperate with the police but could paradoxically work with the bandits.
To be fair, Stockholm Syndrome is not classified as a mental disorder in the DSM-5. The FBI's extensive research into numerous kidnappings indicates that only 5% of victims develop some kind of psychological bond with their captors. Additionally, 3% of the general population hates the police, anyway.
The interest in this phenomenon was piqued once again a year later, in 1974, when Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of a famous publisher, was kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later caught robbing a bank with the group. She was imprisoned for seven years, only to be pardoned and freed by Bill Clinton.
It gets more complicated after this. Quite the opposite of what is described in Stockholm Syndrome, sometimes the kidnappers grow a soft spot for their victims. In 1996, thousands of party attendees at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, were abducted. It is said that the friendly rapport with the kidnappers helped the earlier release of hostages. Anyway, the invited guests were probably high-level diplomats who were well-versed in negotiation skills. The scenario where the perpetrators build a positive bond with their victims is called 'Lima Syndrome'.
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Kristin Enmark
"I did what I could do to survive!"
https://varldenshistoria.se/kriminalitet/stockholmssyndromet
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Contrary to what developed in Stockholm and Lima, hostages sometimes invoke their kidnappers' aversion. In 1980, the Iranian Embassy was seized with 26 captives by terrorists. The hostages were argumentative, loud, and trying to escape. The terrorist quickly shot the loudest one of the lot and threw him out of the Embassy to emphasise his demands with no qualms. This is London Syndrome. The bad behaviour of the victim sparks a negative response.
In one podcast, Radiolab, finally, eight years ago, someone interviewed one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, involved in the Stockholm bank robbery, to find out what was really happening then. Kristin volunteered to be a hostage after overhearing her co-worker speaking on the phone emotionally to her husband about her children's logistics arrangements, as she would be stuck in the crisis.
It is difficult for a third person to predict how a victim would react in a stressful situation. We fail to see why a person repeatedly finds himself trapped in an abusive relationship. We wonder for how long a battered wife gets stuck with her abusive husband. There must be more than meets the eye. The logical thing for a person on the outside is to get out. It is not so easily done.
https://ivno.over-blog.com/2023/03/les-illusions-le-syndrome-de-stockholm.html
