Examples Of The Stockholm Syndrome
Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, 23rd. August, 1973. Armed men charged into the Kreditbanken Bank and kidnapped the employees. The employees were in grave danger and they knew it. Outrageous, yes, but people had been kidnapped before and it would no doubt happen again.
But this proved the be one of the examples of the Stockholm Syndrome.
The extraordinary part about this particular incident was that on the 28th. August, when the employees’ captivity ended, several of them stated that they had no wish to be rescued and added fuel to the fire by refusing to testify against their captors.
Nils Bejerot, the renowned psychiatrist and criminologist, who assisted the police throughout the affair, explained the behaviour of these employees on television, and used the term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ for the first time. The name stuck, and came to mean the peculiar behaviour of kidnap or hostage victims who come to sympathize, even to love, their oppressors.
We saw this again on Monday, 5th. May, 1980, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher invoked the Special Air Service, (S.A.S.), to rescue the hostages from the Iranian Embassy, located at Prince’s Gate, South Kensington, London. Little did we know that we’d see another of the examples of the Stockholm Syndrome.
Up until that date, negotiations had been continuing fairly satisfactorily with police, but there was a noticeable change in the terrorists’ mood. Then they signed their own death warrants by killing a hostage and throwing his body out in the street.
The S.A.S. immediately launched Operation Nimrod and entered the building from two points; a skylight in the roof, and using frame charges on the first floor windows. The whole operation took less that 15 minutes.
There have been many versions told latterly of the raid, but the day following, there was a story by a journalist, himself a hostage, in one of the national newspapers, saying that up to that time, he’d been dead against the S.A.S., looking on them as hired thugs. This changed his view completely. Without them, he said, he wouldn’t be writing that article.
Where the Stockholm Syndrome comes in is that the S.A.S. had the hostages lie on the floor so they could count them. One of the sergeants recognized a terrorist posing as a hostage. He shot him in the head.
A short time later, one of the female hostages, who’d become sympathetic to the terrorists, managed to take the S.A.S. to court for ‘murder.’ The judge fined them a hundred pounds and the whole business melted away.
It was just a year after the Stockholm case when Patty Hearst decided to become an urban guerilla, following her kidnapping by members of a group calling themselves the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army.’
We’ll look at this later and delve into why certain people show such sympathy towards their captors.
Mike Bond again. I thought we’d have a look at the fascinating subject of the Stockholm Syndrome. There’s lots more of interest on my Website and I do hope you’ll pay it a visit, if only for the free downloads. Just click on http://www.wealthyoldman.com