My op-ed piece, below, was published in yesterday's Baltimore Sun. What I did not discuss in the piece is my guess that Phillip Garrido did not have men friends in his life. I will blog about this in the near future.
The case of Jaycee Dugard and her two daughters is terrifying, but we need to keep things in perspective. What happened to Ms. Dugard is so shocking, in part, because it is so rare.
The case is certainly horrifying on multiple levels: that any child could be snatched off the street, be sexually abused and then become emotionally attached to someone like Phillip Garrido; that the victim would give birth to his children; that Mr. Garrido's wife would be complicit in some manner; that Ms. Dugard and her children did not escape; that children were raised with little contact with the social, educational and medical worlds; that authorities and neighbors missed earlier opportunities to blow the whistle; that a convicted sex offender was in the neighborhood; that Mr. Garrido's father said he was mentally unstable and did not intervene; and so on.
However, according to a 1999 National Incidence Study that looked at all categories of missing children, the odds are roughly one in a million that a child will experience what the authors of the study call a "stereotypical kidnapping" - a small subset of nonfamily abductions where he or she is kept in hiding for a lengthy period of time and possibly killed. There are estimated to be 115 per year of these in the U.S. By contrast, the vast majority of nonfamily abductions (estimated at 12,000 annually) are resolved within a short period of time.
Slightly more than 1 percent of all children are reported missing in any one year. Children are much more apt to run away, be thrown out of their homes, or become lost for a benign reason than they are to be abducted.
Let us remember, too, that family abduction is much more common - four to five times as likely - and also can cause significant harm to a child.
Research I recently completed for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children focused on parentally kidnapped children who were missing for a lengthy period of time and had reunited with their left-behind parent. All those I interviewed were adults at the time of our contact and had been missing for between 18 months and 14 years.
The heart of the interviews dealt with their first experiences seeing their left-behind families again, and then what their ongoing experiences were. The longer the time missing, the greater the shock on the part of both the child and left-behind family members in seeing the physical changes that had occurred in the other person. Family members struggled to recognize each other, even for the shorter-term abductions.
Some children had their guard up, ready to protect the abductor. Many were haunted by the pain they saw in the eyes of the left-behind parent, a mirror of their own pain. Children felt misunderstood, unknown, let down, and, in some cases, even more alone than before, when they realized the reunification was not going to be easy or heal all the wounds.
Their problems continue well into adulthood. Time helps but does not erase many of their wounds, even 10 and 20 years later. Difficulties continue with forming relationships, allowing their own children freedom, trusting authority figures, bonding with their left-behind parent, and dealing with guilt because they blame themselves for the abduction.
Whether Jaycee Dugard and her daughters will experience these symptoms cannot be predicted. When something so unspeakably unfair occurs to an 11-year-old and then ends in reunification 18 years later, we are transfixed. But the painful aftermath of the much more common abductions does not abate for others. Just ask those who have been abducted by a parent and eventually return home. Even years later, many are reminded of their own experience and are re-traumatized every time another child is taken.
It is natural to be interested in and concerned about high-profile, stereotypical kidnappings like Jaycee Dugard's. But interest in such cases should not lead us to forget about the victims of more common kinds of abductions, or lead us unnecessarily fear the wrong things.
Geoffrey Greif is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the co-author with Rebecca Hegar of "When Parents
Kidnap: The families behind the headlines." His e-mail is ggreif@ssw.umaryland.edu.
This appeared in the September 7, 2009 Baltimore Sun as an op-ed piece.
