Abused Women May Be ‘Hostages’ : Health: A new study says victims exhibit a behavior common in hostage situations. It may explain why they often remain in harmful relationships.

The bruised and battered young woman appeared at her counselor’s office, clutching a suitcase and ready, she said, to enter a temporary women’s shelter to escape her husband’s abuse.

While the counselor made the arrangements, the woman began to doubt her decision: “If he would only be nice to me, I think everything would be all right.”

Not surprisingly, says University of Cincinnati psychologist Edna Rawlings, “she never went to the shelter.”

The baffling problem of why abused women often remain in harmful relationships is undergoing a radical, new appraisal by mental health experts. They now say these women exhibit a behavior that can develop in classic hostage situations.

Viewed this way, a woman’s tendency to deny the abuse or to blame herself is not necessarily a sign of hopelessness; instead, it may be a sign of her struggle to survive--a phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome.

By understanding this condition, experts say, therapists may be able to develop more effective techniques to help women free themselves.

Stockholm Syndrome may also help explain what experts say is a growing, disturbing phenomenon of young women who stay in abusive dating relationships.

New studies presented here this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Assn. suggest that 28% of dating relationships contain some kind of physical, emotional or sexual abuse against the woman, says Dee Graham, also a psychologist at the University of Cincinnati.

“Stockholm Syndrome is very helpful in aiding us to understand why women stay in these relationships,” Rawlings says. “Mental health workers tend to get very frustrated that she won’t leave the relationship. The goal of therapy now is to eliminate the hostage psychology.”

Stockholm Syndrome refers to a highly publicized 1973 bank holdup in Stockholm, Sweden, in which two men held three women and one man hostage for six days. During captivity, the victims bonded with their captors and eventually saw the police as trying to kill them.

The phenomenon is so common and well understood that police forces now recognize and promote the Stockholm Syndrome in hostage situations, Rawlings says: “It increases the probability of the hostages surviving. Police recognize this even though they know that the captives may not testify against their captors after release. They may even help create defense funds for them.”

Four conditions create Stockholm Syndrome, Rawlings says:

* A person threatens another’s survival and the victim sees the threat as very real;

* The abuser shows the victim some kindness;

* The victim is unable to escape;

* The victim is isolated from outsiders.

Under such conditions, the victim needs protection and nurturing to survive and tries to obtain these from the captor.

“The only person they can turn to is the abuser,” Rawlings says. “If the abuser shows any sign of kindness, it gives the victim hope. Even stopping the abuse can be seen as an act of kindness. (An abused woman) takes this little streak of kindness and uses it as something that will help her survive.”

Eventually, the victim “tries to get inside his head” to understand what makes her abuser angry and to avoid his abuse.

“She looks at the world through his eyes,” Rawlings says. “Eventually, she loses her sense of self. If release is won at this time, she will have a difficult time leaving.”

Intrigued by the parallels between hostages and abused women, Rawlings studied research findings about nine “hostage” groups: battered women, concentration camp prisoners, cult members, prisoners of war, civilians in Chinese Communist prisons, procured prostitutes, incest victims, and physically and emotionally abused children.

“Bonding to the abuser occurred in all nine hostage groups we examined,” Rawlings says.

That Stockholm Syndrome occurs in such a variety of circumstances indicates that it is not a sign of weakness in battered women, she says: “It’s not something only women in bad psychological shape do. It’s simply the smart thing to do.”

Nor is it likely that the syndrome affects a particular kind of person, she says.

Among abused women, indications that the syndrome has developed include signs that the victim is grateful for any act of kindness shown to her, denies the abuse, is hypervigilant to the abuser’s needs, is suspicious of people trying to help her, finds it difficult to leave the abuser and fears the abuser will come back to get her if she leaves.

“They deny the danger they’re in,” Rawlings says. “They see this person as their only friend. This is also a person who has given them life. This is the only identity they have now.”

Therapists report great difficulty in breaking down conditions that set up the syndrome. By explaining the syndrome to a woman, though, she sometimes can see how she is guided by the abuser’s thinking and not her own.

“Stockholm Syndrome helps them understand what happened to them,” Rawlings says. “It helps eliminate the self-blame.”

From there, therapists often try to get the woman to become less isolated and to think about ways in which she could leave the relationship. But the process often takes time.

“We have seen women who have been out of relationships for many years who still show signs of Stockholm Syndrome,” Rawlings says.

The syndrome might be even more likely to develop in young women’s dating relationships, experts say. One reason is that young women are more likely to perceive violence as evidence of love. In one study, says Graham, 25% to 35% of young women perceived violence toward them as a sign of love.

Further, young men in dating relationships tend to receive a lot of peer support for exhibiting behavior that is masculine, aggressive and meant to control a woman, says Barrie Levy, author of the new book “Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger.”

“One of the biggest issues has to do with how confused teen-agers are about violence and that it is not normal,” says Levy, who lives in Los Angeles and works with the Southern California Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “We have seen many women whose battering relationships have started very young.”

Only about one in 25 teen-agers in abusive dating relationships is likely to seek help, she says. In fact, teen-age women often endure peer pressure not to give up their boyfriends.

The Stockholm Syndrome may be no easier to break in dating relationships than it is in marriages, experts note.