Abuse

I wrote the following soon after Shawn Hornbeck was rescued in January of 2007.

Thoughts on Shawn’s possible circumstances

Fear and threats of violence are brought up as motivations for his silence and remaining where he was. This was most likely so, but there are other motivators for silence besides those, especially for a kid. Disgust and shame, feeling filthy – you’re not sure exactly what happened or why, but you know it’s gross and wrong and not normal and shameful, and you don’t want anyone to know ever. You don’t talk. Sometimes you think it’d be better if you died than if anyone knew that about you. It came out in an interview recently Shawn told his parents one thing he tried to do was sleep a lot. Sleep is a common coping mechanism for stressed persons. He also said Devlin sometimes would wake him every 45 minutes – sleep deprivation used as a control mechanism by Devlin.

The crackpot a**holes who posted fake messages to shawnhornbeck.com and other sites pretending to either be Shawn or know where he was not only tormented his family, but caused them to blow off a post actually made by Shawn in hopes of someone noticing it. In my opinion, everyone who did such a thing is complicit in Shawn’s captivity and abuse.

The Oprah encounter is awful. Oprah has spoken openly of her history of childhood sexual abuse, but not until she was a successful adult and (presumably) had counseling beforehand. Why did she think it was alright to bring this up on her show – broadcast worldwide - with the boy less than one week out of his four-year situation? This was another grievous wrong against this boy. Oprah should not have asked the parents the question. They also should have refused to answer it.

None of them knew how to handle it, because this is uncharted territory here in the 21st century. It’s a double-edged sword. These kids get kidnapped, and we need the media and the Internet all over it to help find them. Then, when they are found, all the bloggers and newsers and townspeople and those who read missing persons sites and everyone else who cares and gets involved want to know where they’ve been and what happened to them, because they care and are invested. But once they’re found, it’s not everyone’s business anymore. They need to heal out of the public eye.

It’s different now – we saw video of beautiful Elizabeth Smart playing her harp, and her sister who had the brainstorm of the weird man in their room. Natascha Kampusch escaped her captivity and her captor threw himself in front of a train and died – did he threaten her with that before? We thankfully saw a much bigger Shawn Hornbeck on our TV’s, and we have hope. We feel connected to them. We also know awful things happened to them.

How do we handle this from now on? Elizabeth Smart, Natascha Kampusch and Shawn are the unfortunate pioneers – famous for something infamous and not of their doing, yet the world will look to them whenever something like this happens again.