Kidnapping: Why Jaycee didn’t run

There’s a lot we still have to learn about the kidnapping and captivity of Jaycee Lee Dugard, said Neely Tucker in The Washington Post, but “it is never likely to all add up.” Convicted rapist Phillip Garrido, who allegedly kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee and kept her prisoner in a shack behind his California home for 18 years while fathering two children with her, is clearly deranged. But Jaycee’s psychology is a puzzle. Jaycee, now 29, was hidden in plain sight, said Evelyn Nieves in USA Today. She worked in Garrido’s printing shop, interacted with customers, and had numerous chances to flee, or at least to tell someone who she was. And yet, just like 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart of Utah, who peaceably traveled with her kidnappers for nine months back in 2002, Jaycee chose to live quietly with Garrido. Even now, according to her stepfather, she has “strong feelings” for her kidnapper and says their relationship is “almost like a marriage.” How could this be? “Why didn’t Jaycee Dugard escape?”

“There are other kinds of prisons besides physical ones,” said Stefanie Marsh in the London Times. In all of these cases, monsters like Garrido use “intimidation, threats, and brutality” to break their victims’ wills. Once a state of “perpetual fear” has been induced in the victim, he or she becomes obsessed with pleasing and pacifying the kidnapper, to the point that disobedience, let alone escape, becomes unthinkable. This is the same dynamic behind the so-called Stockholm syndrome, said Dorothy Rowe in the London Mail on Sunday. When someone holds the power of life and death over you, and repeatedly threatens to use it, it’s natural to obey him, and even to develop affection for him, as a way of “surviving emotionally as well as physically.”

In this case, threats eventually may not have been needed, said David Berreby in Slate.com. Children have an instinct to bond with the person providing them with food and shelter, who tells them what to do and not to do. So it was with Garrido and Jaycee Dugard. With such father-like behavior as encouraging her to work in the store and giving her permission to attend neighbors’ birthday parties, Garrido was binding Jaycee closer to him, not risking her escape. This may be the creepiest aspect of this nightmarish saga: Ultimately, Garrido’s control over Jaycee was “not that of a brainwashing monster—it was that of a parent.”

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