Split-Second Persuasion by Kevin Dutton

Author:Kevin Dutton [Dutton, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37461-5
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2010-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Alliance Den

In August 2006, an elderly resident of the Strasshof district of north-eastern Vienna picked up her telephone and dialled 911. A distressed and dishevelled young woman had hammered on her kitchen window begging her to call the police. Some minutes later a squad car pulled up outside. A row with her boyfriend, the frayed ends of an all-night party – there could have been any number of routine explanations for the call. But not in this case. The woman in question turned out to be Natascha Kampusch. And her story, it emerged, was anything but routine.

Eight years previously, aged just ten, Natascha Kampusch had vanished into thin air on her way to school. Her disappearance, at the time, had been all over the Austrian media – front-page news for at least a couple of weeks – and a nationwide search had ensued. There were divers and dogs, a dedicated police unit and civilian volunteers. Even the Hungarians got involved. But all of it had come to nothing. Until now.

In fact, for the whole time she’d been missing, Natascha Kampusch had been literally right there under their noses. In a scene that could easily have sprung from the pages of a Stephen King novel, she’d spent the greater part of the intervening years imprisoned in a dungeon she’d believed to be rigged with explosives.

Alone.

Throughout her ordeal, during the entire period of her extraordinary subterranean imprisonment, her only means of human interaction had been with her abductor, 36-year-old communications technician Wolfgang Priklopil. It was he who’d effectively brought her up, providing her with food, clothes – everything a ten-year-old could wish for. Everything an 18-year-old could wish for. Except freedom. That, unfortunately, was where Priklopil drew the line.

‘He gave her books, even taught her how to read and how to write,’ reported one of the investigators in the case. ‘And mathematics and all things like this, according to what she told us.’

The dungeon measured just four metres by three metres, and had a door 50cm by 50cm.

Completely soundproofed, it was sealed in an underground garage.

And, like Natascha Kampusch herself, would probably never have come to light had she not made a bid for freedom while hoovering her captor’s car.6

Miles Hewstone’s study with the Muslim and Hindu students shows what can happen when group identity suddenly becomes salient. We deify those who are like us, and vilify those who aren’t. We believe what we want to believe. But not all inter-group dynamics work this way round. Under certain, exceptional, circumstances we find ourselves believing what we don’t want to believe. And helping, even liking, those who do us harm.

16Take a condition known as the Stockholm Syndrome – a phenomenon well-documented in the literature on hostage negotiation, and perhaps even better documented in the mind of Natascha Kampusch.

The Stockholm Syndrome refers to a psychological dynamic in which hostages come round to liking, even supporting, their captors. Typically this follows conciliatory gestures on the part of the captors, which run counter to the expectation of the hostages.

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