Time and again during the 18 harrowing years she allegedly spent in captivity, Jaycee Lee Dugard must have had the chance to cry for help. She assisted her alleged abductor, Phillip Garrido, with his home business, sorting out orders by phone or e-mail. She occasionally greeted customers alone at the door. She even went out in public. But she apparently never made a run for it, returning each day instead to a shed in the backyard of the man who allegedly kidnapped and raped her. "Jaycee has strong feelings with this guy," her stepfather Carl Probyn — who saw Dugard snatched at age 11 from a bus stop in 1991 — said Aug. 28. "She really feels it's almost like a marriage."
Baffling it may be, but Dugard's response to her years in captivity is hardly unusual. Explaining it precisely is impossible, but one of the most common theories is the so-called Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which victims display compassion for and even loyalty to their captors. It was first widely recognized after the Swedish bank robbery that gave it its name. For six days in August 1973, thieves Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson held four Stockholm bank employees hostage at gunpoint in a vault. When the victims were released, their reaction shocked the world: they hugged and kissed their captors, declaring their loyalty even as the kidnappers were carted off to jail. Though the precise origin of the term Stockholm syndrome is debated, it is often attributed to remarks during a subsequent news broadcast by the Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who had assisted the police during the robbery.
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