NYTimes Day after day, it was his voice they heard, his face they saw.
He was their tormentor and their deliverer, the one who — at his whim —
could violate their minds and bodies, the keeper of the keys and the
source of food and water. His dominion was a ramshackle house with
boarded up windows. His control was absolute.
For the women he is accused of kidnapping and holding prisoner for a
decade in a home on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland, their captor was for
all intents and purposes their world.
David A. Wolfe, a senior scientist and psychologist at the Center for
Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, said that in
situations of long-term sexual abuse and threat to life, victims
inevitably develop complicated and ambivalent emotions toward their
abuser in order to survive.
“You turn the devil into something you can handle,” he said, adding that
the first thing he would want to know from someone who survived such an
ordeal would be “What was your feeling about this person during the
captivity?”
Dr. Wolfe and other therapists noted that all traumatic experiences are
different and that many details of the women’s ordeal have not been made
public; some experts argued that for the women’s sake, they should not
be.
But they said many people can and do rebound from even the most extreme
abuse, aided by the support of family and friends, the use of
specifically tailored therapies and the privacy, safety and time to
digest and come to terms with their experience. It is important, some
therapists said, that the women not be turned into a spectacle, their
identities as individuals diminished to “kidnap victims.”
“We know that resilience exists and that recovery is possible,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents
at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “For people who believe
that it’s inevitable that a horrific experience like this would leave
lasting scars, the evidence does not necessarily support that.”
