News & Politics
Why Jaycee Dugard Bonded With Her Kidnappers
They used variations on normal parenting tactics.
In December 1871, a young couple left England for India, leaving their two kids behind in the care of a family they'd found in a newspaper ad. The son was about to turn 6; his sister was 3. It would be more than five years before they saw either of their parents again.
For the children, life with their parents had been easygoing and rambunctious, but things were different in “the House of Desolation,” as the boy called the foster family home. The lady of the house was a religious fanatic who hated the boy, beat him mercilessly, and talked mostly about hellfire. Her own son proved to be a sadistic bully. School was just another gauntlet of beatings and ridicule. When his mother finally returned and leaned over to kiss him, the boy instinctively held up his arm to ward off a punch.
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.” Dugard’s stepfather has said that she feels guilty for “bonding” with her torturers. But hard as this may seem at first to grasp, it would be strange, given the nature of childhood, if she had not done so.
That may, in fact, be the creepiest aspect of the case for many people, especially parents. The alleged kidnapper Phillip Garrido and his wife fed and clothed their victims, set up rules for the household, defined the boundaries of their lives. Though Garrido appears to be out of his mind, those acts aren't evidence of his madness. Quite the opposite: Giving food and shelter and setting boundaries are what all parents and parent-substitutes are supposed to do. And even when the parenting is a grotesque parody of the real thing, children accept the signs of care as “eternally established”—the way of their world.
It may well be that they have no choice—that acceptance is innate, because of the way children are built, wherever they are raised. If that were true, then certain aspects of family life should be the same in all cultures. And in fact, they are. As Duke University anthropologist Naomi Quinn has pointed out, comparative studies of child-rearing have found universal traits in the ways that parents everywhere “engineer the child's experience” in order to raise him or her.
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.
A third universal is connecting the child's actions to moral feelings: Mothers and fathers everywhere don't just say, “Don't do that!” They say, “That's bad! That's wrong!” Quinn writes: “Brought home with evaluations of the learner's goodness and badness, these lessons are even more motivating and unforgettable."
From police accounts, the Garrido household sounds like a place in which these basic parenting strategies were used. Shelter for Dugard and her children consisted of shacks and patched-up tents, but it was shelter. Strong emotions? Dugard was snatched from her home at age 11 and gave birth to her alleged kidnapper's child at 14. No one ever said the strong feelings of child-raising had to be positive.
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This article told us nothing.
By: james_john_king | Mon, 09/07/2009 - 14:30
The author expects us to swallow unproven speculation based on nothing. Even if we buy his ideas, this kid was not five years old; she was eleven. Old enough to not be taken in. Did she just forget her real family? Of course not. There is some explanation, but this isn't it. A child the age she was at the time of her abduction would have known better. Anyone who says otherwise does not themselves know a thing about children, or remember being one.
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The Flip Side of this argument
By: Ms_2B | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 17:40
There is a major point missing in this piece - Why didn't the victims say something, etc. My mother married one of those religious nutjobs who isolated and violently abused us verbally, emotionally and physically in the 'name of god'. Bla bla bla.
I told EVERYONE I could trying to get some help. Aunts, uncles, teachers, pastors, sunday school teachers, school counsellors, principals... you get the picture. The responses I got were pretty standard. The religious nutjobs basically gave me the 'god says you have to honour your parents' and the school people just stared blankly. We couldn't possibly be 'those kinds of people' as we lived in the right neighbourhood, dressed well, and drove decent vehicles.
In the 8 years I lived with that psycho bastard ONE single person tried to help. He got shut down by my parents and the church people and I was punished for talking to someone about the family.
If you wonder why she didn't go looking for help, the answer might be simple. She did, but no one chose to do anything about it.
Criticuria, you write: The
By: nagatuki | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 08:52
Criticuria, you write: The "wider world"? As if secular folks don't limit their kid's scope of acceptable friends ... heard of a liberal inviting her kids to get chummy with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, or Fundamentalist's kids?
First, thanks for clarifying which "religious" you intended; I see your overall issue, but it's still not a stretch to know what the author is talking about when she says "religious" - we know she means the ones that keep to themselves.
But on the other hand, while you say you're not religious (what's a sympathizer?), your bias is showing, too.
I assume by your last statement you know no liberals (or at least, they don't admit it to you). But it's laughable that you'd accuse liberals of keeping their kids away from others. I mean, really?
Okay, let's take a look at our country today:
Conservatives are more likely to protest bi-lingual education (stupid foreigners!), more likely to want _Christian_ prayers in school, more likely to want to ban or burn books altogether that promote "witchcraft" or, say, two penguins raising another, or any other issue they object to, and, oh, yes, not want their precious kids to learn anything about sexuality because we wouldn't want them exposed to a "liberal agenda" of knowing one's own body.
But to answer your question: yes, I know liberals who have their kids play with Baptist kids (and politely sit through that family praying at _their_ house before meals), and have been friends with people of all faiths myself growing up - various Christian denominations (not one myself), and Hindu, and Muslim, and everything else.
I'm just sick of this argument, frankly. Liberals cannot be both accepting of everything - say, the "gay lifestyle" - and at the same time be bigoted enough to "limit" who they hang with.
And you know why you're trying to suggest liberals are just the same? Because it makes conservative bigotry against others acceptable. If everyone does it then it's fine, but if it's just you, it looks bad, so conversatives constantly make up this false argument that liberals are just like them (except when they're not).