Shawn Hornbeck

What to think of Shawn Hornbeck, kidnapped at age eleven, living in a house with his kidnapper, yet free to move around, to ride his bicycle, to visit friends in their house and even to sleep over, yet for four years he made no attempt to escape—it would have been effortless, he just had to walk into a police station—or even to call his mother and tell her he was alive and relieve her of the nightmare in which she must have been living. An unsigned article in the Daily Mail attributes Shawn’s behavior to the Stockholm Syndrome, a captive’s emotional identification with his captor. But it seems to me that Stockholm Syndrome is a symptom of something deeper—a lack of self, and thus a passivity, and thus a plasticity, that can be found in many human beings. Are Zelig and Shawn Hornbeck brothers under the skin?

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A reader writes:

Or did he actually prefer life with his captor? Could there have been trouble at home? Or just the usual childish thing of not getting the attention he wanted? I heard this morning that at one point he was in violation of curfew (I guess they have curfews out there for underage kids) and was actually picked up in a police vehicle and he could have told them of his situation then but didn’t. He also had access to Internet and cell phone, it seems. It’s a mystery. It could be the media just loves the story of the boys getting back to their parents. A psychologist, and mostly they are perfectly awful, but this time a sober kind of psychologist was suggesting some of what I said above, that the boy should be allowed to speak the truth, were there aspects of his home life he didn’t like and so on, but everyone is practically forcing him to say how he was held by a sort of brainwashing and how great it is to be home and so on. But the anchor said, well thank you, but in general, these boys are back home and that is a good thing. So there was a sense of wanting to close that down, or be sure to close on a positive note. Still nothing has been said or asked about his not going to school for four years, as far as I have heard.

LA replies:

As usual the reporters, who supposedly become reporters because they are curious about the world, have zero curiousity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2007 02:40 AM | Send