In Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, on August 23, 1973, criminal Jan-Erik Olsson entered a bank, pulled out a gun, and took four branch employees hostage. He then demanded a car to escape, cash, and that an accomplice of his who was imprisoned be released and taken quickly to the bank where he was.
The police surrounded the place, placing snipers in the surroundings. The robbers took refuge in the bank vault, keeping the hostages with them. A policeman then entered the bank and closed the vault door, locking both the bandits and the group’s hostages inside.
That’s when the story got weird. From inside the vault, Kristin Enmark, who was among the hostages, called the Swedish prime minister and begged that her captors be allowed to leave. Stranger still, she stated that she would like to go with them.
The prime minister refused the idea, the police began to prepare to break into the vault. The criminals agreed to leave, but the hostages offered to serve as human shields, protecting their captors from the possibility of being shot dead by the police.
Subsequently, the hostages would refuse to testify in court against the assailants — and would even raise money to fund the defendants’ defense.
It seemed the hostages had gone mad, siding with their captors, not the police. Because of this case, this psychological response came to be known as “Stockholm syndrome”.
It’s not what it looks like
However, if we look more closely, we will see that this story is not so simple. In fact, Enmark had good reason to believe that she was more likely to be killed in a shootout started by cops willing to pull the trigger easily than by assailants.
It was therefore in their own interest that the criminals be allowed to leave the site safely.
Since 1973, the Stockholm syndrome concept has been reported in the press in various kidnappings and hostage crimes. Many people, however, are skeptical about the existence of such a phenomenon.
The “syndrome” was never officially recognized as a psychiatric disorder. In 1989, an FBI survey of 600 police departments was unable to record any kidnapping case in which an emotional involvement between victim and kidnapper affected a rescue operation. In short, this type of occurrence is extremely rare.
This text is based on the BBC Ideas video The real story of the Stockholm syndrome. Click here to see the video (in English)
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