A couple is arguing. The woman is crying as her husband yells at her for some small thing she did incorrectly. The next day, she appears with a black eye, and claims she bumped into a door. When confronted, she eventually admits that her husband hit her but it was her fault and that she deserved to be hit. This reversal in perception of right and wrong is more commonly known as Stockholm Syndrome
The term Stockholm Syndrome derives from the first documented case of the phenomenon. On 10:15am on August 24, 1973, the Stockholm branch of Kredit Banken, a Swedish bank, was the setting for a brutal bank robbery. Two armed men in ski masks took three women and a man hostage, and started a six-day siege with the police. The robbers were harsh and violent: they threatened the hostages lives with guns and later tied nooses with which the hostages were to hang themselves in case of a police assault. Astonishingly, the hostages are quoted, as being afraid of the police and seriously believed that the robbers were in the right. Later on, one of the women held hostage became engaged to one of her captors and another started a defense fund. Why would hostages perceive the people intending to kill them as good people, even going so far as to fall in love with them?
Stockholm Syndrome is caused by a series of actions, rather than one incident. The victim perceives a threat to their well being and has the impression that the abuser will carry out that threat. If the abuser doesn’t carry out that threat or even gives the victim some sort of small kindness like food, the victim becomes confused. S/he begins to disassociate the abuser into two people: the abuser and the nurturer. Isolation from any other perspective leads the victim to view the world through the eyes of the abuser. The perception of an inability to escape leads the victim to become hypervigilant to the needs of the abuser to the point of perceiving the police as enemies and defending the action of his/her abuser.
There is no definite cure for Stockholm Syndrome. Each aspect of Stockholm Syndrome needs to be dealt with separately and resolved before another aspect can be addressed. The issue of isolation or sensory deprivation can be resolved by encouraging and identifying sources of support, like a crisis center or a hotline. Many victims have the hardest time dealing with the violence they experience. Many abuse victims deny the abuse ever occurred, and must be questioned intensely. Abuse victims also tend to have confusion about male authority roles and keeping a journal and viewing films with plots similar to their experiences help the victim accept that the violence occurred. By far the worst aspect of Stockholm Syndrome is disassociation of the abuser’s behaviors. Many victims of the syndrome separate the abuser’s behaviors into a nice person and a bad person and the victim needs to step back and look at the action as if putting the pieces of a puzzle together. Last but not least is the aspect of a small perceived kindness on the part of the abuser that leads to hypervigilance. The victim needs to be encouraged to develop other sources of caring.
Victims of Stockholm Syndrome tend to be women, however, it is not uncommon for men to develop the syndrome. The main victims of the syndrome tend to be people unlawfully held in prisons including: Holocaust victims, POWs and civilians in Chinese communist prisons. Many people in a position of sexual abuse also develop Stockholm Syndrome. Many incest victims, abused children and women and especially women forced into prostitution by men they trust are found to have the syndrome. By far the most publicized cases of Stockholm Syndrome are either hostages like the namesake case, in 1973, or cult members. The kidnapping of Patty Hearst is by far the best known incident of Stockholm Syndrome.
February 4th, 1974, the full moon of that month. Three armed people broke into an apartment in Berkeley, California and took nineteen-year-old heiress Patricia Hearst hostage. The kidnappers were members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a revolutionary group who had recently been found guilty of the death of an Oakland, California elementary school principal. The group was made up of young white middle class people with a african-american leader. The group patterned itself after Che Guevara, the revolutionary who aided Fidel Castro and was later active in Bolivia. They fancied themselves to be fighting for the people and they justified their terrorist actions as being directed "against the fascist insects."
In December of 1973, the FBI raided a safehouse of the SLA that had been set on fire. They recovered documents that detailed the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which was scheduled to take place on January 7th, a month before it actually took place. Incidentally, the FBI never alerted the Hearst family of the content of these documents, which could have resulted in the prevention of the kidnapping. The safehouse was later proven to have been burned intentionally to "melt fingerprints" and eliminate evidence that linked the SLA to other crimes.
Late on the night of February 4, 1973, a distraught woman knocked on the door of the residence of Patricia Hearst and her fiancé at the time, Steven Weed. The woman claimed to have slammed her car into a garage located under their apartment. She eventually persuaded Weed to let her in to use the phone. AS he opened the door, two armed men rushed in and attacked him. As he lay unconscious, the three kidnappers grabbed Hearst and dumped her into the trunk of their car. The SLA members took her to a safehouse and shoved her into a closet. Hearst remained in the closet for fifty-seven days, being subject to numerous rapes, yet she asked her parents to accede to the demands made by the SLA. The demands specified that the Hearsts spend seventy dollars for each impoverished California resident, specifically in food. The total cost was estimated at four hundred million dollars, which the Hearsts didn’t have access to. The SLA and the Hearsts compromised at six million spend on the PIN (people in need) program. The first two million dollars were spent immediately and the remaining four million were placed into an escrow account, to be used as soon as Patty Hearst was released. The PIN program was a complete failure. The food was of poor quality and was thrown down from vans in the middle of the streets. Rioting insued, and the SLA cut off negotiations with the Hearst family. It was in the communiqué following that Patty Hearst renounced her family and changed her name to Tania, the consort of Che Guevara for many years.
What follows next is not known for certain, and whether or not Hearst really chose to participate in the April 15th robbery of the San Francisco Hibernia bank branch. The bank robbery was widely criticized by other revolutionary groups in the bay area. The bank robbery was considered plebian, and more of a common place sort of crime; not at all related to human rights. The next incident to occur was a shootout, further proving Patty (Tania’s) allegiance to the members of the SLA.
On May 16, Bill Harris (a general of the SLA) and his wife Emily entered a sports supply store in Los Angeles. Bill was caught shoplifting and he was thrown to the ground by a security guard. Upon seeing this, Hearst opened fire on the store, helping both Harris’s to escape. Several carjackings later, Emily Harris came upon a van for sale. She asked Tom Matthews, the seventeen-year-old owner, if she and her friends could take a test drive. He agreed. After driving for a while, the group revealed themselves to him. Matthews was elated to be in the company of the famous "Tania" and asked her lots of questions and listened to her preaching of the SLA ideas. He claimed to have been kidnapped and later lied about Hearst’s involvement in his pseudo kidnapping.
After allowing Matthews to drive home, the Harris’s and Hearst hijacked several other cars and eventually bought a car. In their new car, they drove to a motel in Anaheim and awaited a rendezvous with the other SLA members. As they got settled in their motel room, someone flipped on the television set and to their collective shock and dismay, the newest SLA safehouse was in flames. Approximately 9000 rounds of ammunition were exchanged between the police and the SLA. All members of the SLA other than the Harris’s and Hearst perished.
The remnants of the SLA went to the East Coast and began to recruit more members. The SLA remained underground for approximately one year, until they went back to the bay area and began bombing cars and robbing more banks. They called themselves the "New World Liberation Front" but included the ending that they were well known for: "death to the fascist insects."
On September 18, 1975, Hearst was sitting in a kitchen of a safe house in San Francisco, listening to a fellow SLA member. The woman was interrupted by a loud "FBI! FREEZE! FBI!" So ended a twenty-one-month period of terror.
The trial of Patricia Hearst was fraught with legal bungling, as well as a judge who didn’t bother to stay awake on the bench. Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery and sentenced to nine years in prison. After she served two years, President Carter commuted her sentence and after leaving office began to campaign for a full pardon for her. Eventually, President Clinton pardoned her on his last day in office. She is now living in Connecticut and is living the life of a society mother and wife as well as writing two books and acting in several movies.
Back to the woman suffering spousal abuse. Many people are suffering Stockholm Syndrome and it just isn’t only in abusive relationships or hostage situations. Psychologist Dee Graham wrote in her book Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence and Women’s Lives, that Stockholm Syndrome occurs on a societal level and is linked to behaviors such as co-dependence and masochism. Many argue that Dee Graham is an extremist, but there is a note of truth to what she is saying. Do all women suffer from this psychological disorder?