The three girls, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight, who were kidnapped and trapped in a house, were maybe tied up for weeks for months, , but I would not think they were tied up for 10 long years and did not get a chance at all to escape. When the abuser left the house for work, most likely the girls were alone in the house. One of the girls even gave birth to a baby 6 years ago. She was probably not tied up during her late pregnancy. The little girl was not probably tied up for 6 years. The question is, why they did not scream for help or tried to escape when they were not chained or gagged. They could break a door or a window. Doors were maybe locked but windows were not locked.
We should not forget that Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard also did not try to escape. Elzabeth Smart was 14 when she was taken from her bed in the middle of the night by Brian David Mitchell, who claimed her as his bride and sexually abused her for nine months. Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped by Phillip Garrido on her way to school at age 11, and imprisoned for 18 years, giving birth to two children. Both Smart and Dugard had several opportunities to escape. Mitchell took Smart to parties and restaurants. Dugard spoke to Garrido’s parole officer and worked at his printing business. This kind of situation is not uncommon among those who have been held against their will for long periods of time. Just like most housewives and many working women who are forced to live with their abuser husbands against their will.
“Victimised women are separated by their captors from all of the people and experiences that they’ve had that would contribute to a) self-esteem and b) their self confidence and their identity.”
“The tactics used by abductors are designed to make their captives feel worthless, powerless and afraid.”
“Usually there is some physical restraint, but eventually that’s substituted for by the techniques similar to what cults use: mind control, threats.”
“There can be such a wide range of abuse that a victim who is no longer viciously abused may feel gratitude towards their captor”.
“On the other hand, they’re also afraid that if they try to escape and fail, all those conditions which are at the moment tolerable will become intolerable.”
“Dugard told that she didn’t try to escape because: “What I knew was safe. The unknown out there was terrifying.”
“The sexual abuse is humiliating, demeaning, makes you feel not very good about yourself. It instils a sense of hopelessness.”
“Amanda Berry’s call to 911 may have been telling. “I’m Amanda Berry,” she said. “I’ve been on the news for the last 10 years. That sense of self – and that people were looking for her – may have helped give her the confidence to leave.”
“There is a sense of abandonment if you think the search has stopped. And that fear is often played up by abductors, who tell captors their families have stopped looking. But Berry knew she hadn’t been forgotten, and that may have given her the strength to fight for freedom.”
“This will be with them for a long time, and possibly forever. They are going to have nightmares. They may feel suspicious of other people, strangers, men in particular.”
“They will have to readjust from a life in captivity to a life in the real world, complete with sounds, smells, and people crowding around them. They are basically bombarded with stimulation after a long time of having very little.”
“It took 10 years for the three women in Cleveland to find their way out of the door and into the light. And it may take them many more years to adjust to the change.”
Psychologists make sense.
“The question is, why they did not scream for help or tried to escape when they were not chained or their mouth were not gagged.”
One of the woman was apparently banging on the windows trying to get neighbours’ attention several times. The neighbours say that they rang 911 several times over the years after seeing Castro walking naked women around the back yard on a leash. Cops came over, talked to Castro for a few minutes, then left.
It must have been sick for these women to realise that even if they wanted to escape, cops weren’t all that arsed about helping them.
I was incredulous when I read your post. I have no trust for cops and view most of them as corrupt, but I hoped your statements weren’t true. Sadly, news articles I’ve seen confirm it. It’s infuriating to think something could have been done years earlier.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/8/headlines
Ramsey said in interviews he would have done something sooner if he had known, that he had only lived next door for a year. But apparently long-time residents either turned a blind eye to what they saw, or “law enforcement” did it for them.
There were similar complaints about Jaycee Dugard, if I remember. There were several visits to the property of her captor by the police, but virtually no real investigation. You have to wonder how many other people might be in similar straits, with no (safe) way out and the police not bothering to do their jobs.
Hopefully these cases, this one and Dugard’s, will provide a wake-up call to at least some police officials, who should institute new rules for responding to suspicious activity. It’s certain that not following up just because no one answered the door is not the proper way to go!
Sadly, I don’t anticipate any such changes.
How could a police officer tell the difference between a kidnap victim and a normal every day fundamentalist wife or daughter?
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe TALK TO HER?
I had a chat friend a while back whose husband used to beat her. She called the cops on him one day and they sent out a deputy. Husband met the deputy in the yard, where they talked, and laughed, and then the deputy left! He never even asked to speak to the woman who called for help!
Sure,the cop couldn’t have known that he was dealing with a kidnapping, but when you receive a report of a woman in distress, wouldn’t you at least try to speak to the woman?
This is a huge problem in the world. There are far too many people, both male and female, who still consider women and girls to be the property of their husbands or fathers. When these people are in positions of authority, the women have little chance of escaping from such situations.
This is really true. One could argue every problem in the world is sourced from this problem because mothers control the emotional development of the species and misogyny is the dumbest idea in the history of human ‘development’. It’s really amazing that so many girls subscribe to it.
For as long as women buy into misogyny and fall into that trap (cosmetics, obsessing over beauty / sex / appearances, lying to men about female reproductive biology, rejecting agency because they want to control Demand for the imagined power source), men will be the hapless victims of the misogynist cartel.
You cannot emancipate slaves shackled by their mothers who proceed to shackle themselves. Only mothers and their Polite Society have the power to perpetuate misogyny. Though it is often (illogically) asserted otherwise, the simple truth is men have no motive to carry needy dependents without agency. It’s all nonsense propagated by the women who choose to be needy dependents without agency. They want to be chased.
And the world burns with the unnatural passion that, in nature, is felt by the mammal mother for the offspring and not the other way around. Humans seem a little confused (about everything).
Holy fuck! The stupid is strong with this one.
Ah yes, the trap. The trap that only beautiful women are good enough for those asshole men. The trap set by those asshole men! I guess you must be one of those REAL men who, after a long hard day digging ditches, sprinkle on a little gunpowder, splash some bourbon under your arms and head out to the local watering hole to beat up the first pair of tits you can find.
Or do you, like most men in the world, get cleaned up, showered, shaved, cologned, deoderized and “duded up” before going out to impress the ladies? Appearances, for both sexes, is important in most mating rituals. And I’ll give you a little information that’s taken me more than 40 years of marriage to the same woman to learn: While women do dress up to attract men, they do it even more to impress other women! Even when they aren’t looking for some caveman to carry them off, they tend to be very concerned about how other women will view them.
Of course, if men were smart enough to be attracted to women’s minds instead of their asses maybe things would be different.
And fuck you, too! I’m sure those young girls who were kidnapped by that asshole in Cleveland are deeply sorry for perpetuating misogyny! If only they hadn’t been so cute. If only they hadn’t been so – female!
Sorry, dickhead. Not all men are led by their cocks. It’s only idiots who find it necessary to blame their victims. I imagine you really do believe that all of those young girls who are taken and sold into sexual slavery, taken by poor, deluded “victims of the misogynist cartel”, are really responsible for what’s being done to them every day! I’d guess you’re one of those people who actually believe that a high school girl in Steubenville really wanted to be drugged into unconsciousness and then dragged all over town to be raped by those poor defenseless football players. After all, how else is a poor girl supposed to find a decent husband?
Chase, yes! That’s part of the fun, whether you’re being chased or doing the chasing. It’s part of the ritual. Being drugged, beaten, raped and treated as property is not. Are their women who teach their daughters to accept these things? Certainly! It’s a matter of survival, for both their daughters and themselves. Rebellious slaves tend to get severely punished, or killed. When their owner tells them, “Show me how awesome and wonderful I am, or I’ll beat your daughters to death”, what mother wouldn’t?
Whoa dude! You’re way too emotional. You will not be able to perceive anything remotely close to truth until you can substitute emotional feeling with logical thought.
Is that a fact? I think you’ll find that it’s almost exclusively mothers spraying the acid of misogynist shame at little girls; men don’t have a motive to be assholes unless, of course, their mothers hate women (and in hating women, effectively destroy their sons’ chances for happiness by deceiving them about female reproductive biology). nb. See the link at the end of this post of truth for some horrifying – (sur)real life – proof.
It has been my very extensive experience that men (when intoxicated or not even) will literally sleep with anything. Men do not impose cosmetic standards upon girls; cosmetic requirements are almost exclusively imposed upon women by women who have embraced misogyny. That’s women subjugating women. Men have never actually had a motive to reduce women to needy dependants, but women (who idiotically perceive a motive to reduce themselves) have been (illogically) asserting otherwise for a long time.
nb. Concerned about whether or not it was appropriate to post such a long comment (albeit consisting of the purest of truth), I cut out half and placed the full response here:
Google Document
We can talk about the need to eradicate misogyny all day; but until you understand that women need to be Self-reliant, you will continue to enable their Self-inflicted slavery (dependency). Toddlers want to have their cake and eat it as well. Grown-ups only value truth. When girls grow up and start valuing truth, their offspring might stand a chance of receiving an uncorrupted emotional education. Though we’re likely already game-play screwed, it’s the only chance our species has of emerging from the Dark Ages of Religious Misogyny and avoiding M.A.D. (which we are presently racing towards, in liability-free competition). You’d be doing yourself and 7.3 billion others a favor if you stopped patronising women and became a patron of truth.
Here is some truth that is Not Suitable for Polite Society – be warned! It’s very true. You might want to belay the viewing of it, if you have recently eaten. You’ll never see anything like this on the news, because you are being lied to about the world you live in.
The mob in this video consists only of men who subscribe to the Religion of Peace. It’s about as peaceful as slaves in Land of the Free are free. One girl lies in the centre of the emotional insanity. The psychotic madness on display here is unfathomable, because everyone there knows she needs to die. Her crime?
You might say, it was more of a ‘sin’ (i.e. an act which erodes the misogynist construct of marriage, usually limited to having fun without hurting anyone). These men all despise her for her ‘sin’ of liking sex to the point where she risked death to “follow her heart” (extramarital affair). I know right? Wherever could men have gotten the idea that their best interests were served by doing this to women who like sex?
You know the answer as well as I do. It’s mothers who perpetuate misogyny. That’s women who hate women who reveal the truth. We live in horrifying societies where truth is despised and whore values (like deceit and violence) are nearly universally subscribed to.
It’s time for truth. Everyone needs to grow up.
It’s always this, I suspect.
It’s true for every child.
In a less disputable context, it was definitely my experience (born into cult). Terrifying unknown, fear of disturbing the delicate balance that was tolerable. When it was no longer tolerable (at 14), it was a no-brainer. But I could have run a lot earlier and didn’t for the above reasons.
Their families and people they meet aren’t going to understand. They’re in for hell, really. They should get new identities and start somewhere fresh.
And just how can they do that? They’ve been outside of the normal world for 10 years! They won’t be able to function in the real world for quite some time, and their families and friends will be the greatest resource they have to learn how to cope. Yes, there will be problems. Yes, there will be nightmares. But there will also be help for them. It will take time but hopefully they will recover fully enough to be able to deal with the rest of the world.
The biggest problem will be dealing with the media vultures who will want every gory little incident, in excruciating detail, to splash across the headlines for their readers/viewers.
Easy. Tell their story as quick as they can, collect the cash, change names, some very cosmetic plastic surgery and just start fresh. With no links to the past, you can just wipe it away. They’ve been coping with it for a decade. What they’ll never be able to learn how to handle is people who won’t have a clue how to handle them. Endless awkward. People are the worst.
I was outside for 14. The first 14. Straight into the psychotic Machiavellian world that is high school. If you aren’t causing trouble, people have no real motive to bother you. The normal world is not some obstacle course of complications until you have to juggle the deceit, manipulative games and endless needy impositions (i.e. family / friends). That’s what they should be postponing.
I read about one girl who had the right idea; took a taxi and skipped out of hospital as her demented family hired a lawyer to attempt to force access (her Right to be alone was communicated by hospital staff to those who ignored her wishes because they simply Know Best).
They know how to exchange money for goods and services, catch public transportation and make polite small talk! They’re not demented; just traumatised. But that’s the perception (that they cannot function) that’ll make it impossible for them to cope. Their only problems will be related to family and friends. Can you imagine the demented awkwardness once the initial buzz dies down? They don’t know each other. They’re strangers. I’d bet you anything the caring roles will be reversed.
Catering to a demand that is present in their families and friends (or it will be soon enough). They should just tell their story, get the cash and wipe the slate clean. Families are just….traps of emotional needy. These girls are a lot stronger than people realise.
They’d be dead otherwise.
I can see several problems with this viewpoint. First, these women were, for all intents and purposes, locked away in prison for ten years. Even worse since all but the worst prisoners generally have at least some contact with the outside world: TV, computers, phones, family contacts. Psychological studies have shown that even under the best conditions, confinement in prison tends to lock prisoners into the emotional age they are at when confined. In other words, for these women, they are still emotionally 14, 17 and 21 years old!
The older woman is the one who refused access to her family, and from what I’ve read she had broken from them ten years ago just before she was taken, so it’s not hard to reconcile her actions. I don’t know the circumstances of the original split, but as far as she’s concerned there’s no more reason to trust her family now than there was before. Imagine her position: missing for ten years and learning that no one was looking for her! I’d probably take off, too. But I think it will be much harder for her to heal on her own. I hope she can find someone, some people, who will help her rather than try to take advantage of her.
The other two women, though, are still teenagers, mentally. And they were taken from (apparently) loving families. Families which have been searching for them, remembering them, for the entire time! They need those families, just as much as those families need them.
I get it. Your family may not have been the best. Might even have been one of the worst. The kind who looked at you for what you could give them rather than for who you are. I’ve seen that, many times. But there are truly loving families out there. Families who love their children unconditionally. My own children are having to deal with spouses who were brought up in “traps of emotional needy”, parents who were more concerned about their next fix rather than their kids next meal. It took some time for those spouses to learn to trust us, to accept that we really do love them unconditionally. But they have learned, continue to learn.
And these women will also learn. Look at Jaycee Dugard, for example. A very similar situation, for an even longer time. I’m sure she will tell you that without her family things would have been far more difficult, perhaps even impossible. But it’s quite certain that, along with everything else, these women will need a lot of time, and privacy, to get their lives back. And loving, caring families will only help them to do that.
Oh! This makes me cry.