Did you ever wonder how children survive the abuse of religious and ideological indoctrination? Slate – Why Jaycee Dugard Bonded With Her Kidnappers:
“The House of Desolation is well-known because the boy was Rudyard Kipling, who, in his autobiography, answered the questions that are always asked about abused children during the first shock of discovery: Why didn’t they tell anyone? Why did they cooperate? Those questions are being asked now about Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was, police say, held for 18 years by the couple who kidnapped her at age 11. Why didn’t she tell anyone? How is it possible that Dugard not only raised the two daughters she had by her alleged kidnapper with him and his wife, but also worked in his printing business?
To Kipling, this sort of question reflected a lack of understanding of children, and childhood: “Children tell little more than animals,” he wrote,”for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”
One of those universals, no surprise, is routine and constancy—the small, unchanging certainties that make even the weirdest domestic life feel eternally established. Child-rearers everywhere struggle to make the kids’ world a place where the family rules always hold. And parents everywhere connect their lessons to strong emotions. Americans tend to praise good behavior more than Chinese parents, who are more likely to instill shame over lapses, Quinn writes, but the strategy is the same: Make the child remember what is important by connecting the lesson to an intense feeling, whether induced by fear or the desire to please.
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The control that authorities say Garrido had over his victims was not that of a brainwashing monster— it was that of a parent. “I’m so proud of my girls. They don’t know any curse words,” Garrido told Ally Jacobs, the Berkeley police officer whose suspicions about the children cracked the case. “We raised them right. They don’t know anything bad about the world.” Garrido’s approach to child-rearing even included the typical parent’s decision to let the children attend neighbors’ birthday parties. That methods of raising children are deeply alike even as ideologies vary is, of course, the reason people don’t agree where to draw the line between a religious household and a crazy-cult one.
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As a number of psychiatrists and therapists have said, part of the work ahead for the three victims, Dugard and her two children, will consist in reconciling their new, free lives with their old one. Removed from the circumstances that made them act as they did, they may have trouble forgiving, or even understanding, their former selves. But a look at memoirs by children raised in cults suggests their prospects aren’t all bleak.”
Of course bounding with kidnappers is not unique for children and has been shown during numerous prolonged hostage situations.
Further Reading:
Maugli Syndrome, Stockholm Syndrome…whatever
Fyodor Dostoyevsky versus the Grand Inquisitor in Seville
Zizek Explains Izbitzer
