Why kidnap victims and battered women may be to slow to escape.

• Author: Van Wormer, Katherine
• Position: Psychology

IN JANUARY, THE SEARCH for a missing 13-year-old boy, Ben Ownby, led police to the home of his suspected kidnapper, Michael Devlin. There they found not one, but two, kidnap victims. Shawn Hornbeck had been abducted while riding his bicycle four years before. The 15-year-old Hornbeck was well-known to neighbors and friends. The story, as flashed out over the TV networks, left Americans stunned. Here was a boy who had surfed the Internet, owned a cell phone, ridden a bike, and even called the police to report that an earlier bicycle had been stolen. Here was a boy who had helped in the capture of a second, younger boy. Here was a kidnap victim who had every opportunity to escape, but failed to do so.

Some people's minds had flashbacks to the 1970s when former kidnap victim Patty Hearst was found by police engaging in robberies with the gang that had abducted her. On his Fox News Channel show, "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly did not mince his words: "I'm not buying this. If you're 11 years old or 12 years old, 13, and you have a strong bond with your family, Okay, even if the guy threatens you, this and that, you're tiding your bike around, you got friends. The kid didn't go to school. There's all kinds of stuff. If you can get away, you get away. All right?.... This is what I believe happened in the Hearst case and in this case. The situation that Hearst found herself in was exciting. She had a boring life. She was a child of privilege. All of a sudden, she's in with a bunch of charismatic thugs, and she enjoyed it. The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn't have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted."

There was a reason Devlin afforded his young captive such freedom: his conditioning of the boy had been successful. It was because the youngster he took care of was different from the one whom he had captured and tortured (psychologically and possibly physically) four years earlier. Hornbeck probably had proved his loyalty to Devlin in many ways. Devlin's techniques may not have been aimed deliberately at indoctrination, but they most certainly were designed to break down any resistance. The strategies he used would have been relatively the same as those employed by the government to accomplish the same thing.

The government, as O'Reilly should know, uses advanced techniques to get noncitizen detainees captured in the war on terror to "crack." According to reports on these methods, the most efficient technique is to break down the suspect's defenses through a combination of physical discomfort and psychological deprivation (of light or dark, regular meals, sleep, comfortable sitting positions). The good-cop, bad-cop strategy also is utilized so that the detainee will confide in the supposed ally. Once the person talks a little, he or she is told, "You're mined now with your people, so you might as well tell all and let us help you." Loners usually take longer to break down.

These methods bear some resemblance to those of...