Thread by @erinbowbooks

I just read -- in the book SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO by Jess Hill -- about the incident in Stockholm for which Stockholm Syndrome is named, and I am royally pissed off on behalf of all women, buckle up.

So, in 1973 there was this bank robbery In Stockholm. Two gunmen took four bank clerks hostage. This doesn't happen much in Sweden, and the police response can most charitably be described as inept. They surrounded the bank and kept it under siege for six days.

The public was rapt. The police probably felt they couldn't back down.

They got off to a bang up start when they sent their psychiatrist Nils Bejerot and a teenaged kid THOUGHT was the gunman's younger brother into the bank to negotiate. The kid was not in fact the younger brother and he got shot. Nils got out, though. Put a pin in that.

One of the hostages was a woman named Kristin Enmark. She strategically got close to the gunman who seemed more sane and more stable, because she thought that getting his protection was the best bet for getting out of there.

Definitely she didn't want to leave their lives in the hands of the police. She tried to talk to our friend Nils on the phone -- he refused to talk to her.

From inside the bank she gave a radio interview: "[The police] are playing with our lives. And they don't even want to talk to me, who is the one who will die if anything happens."

She was terrified the police would storm the bank and she and the other hostages would be killed in the cross fire. She even called the Swedish Prime Minister, proposing a plan where she and another hostage would leave the besieged bank with the two robbers.

The prime minister refused to agree, saying they couldn't give in to the demands of criminals. He told her: "Well, Kristin, you can't get out of the bank. You will have to content yourself that you will have died at your post."

When the police finally did teargas the place, they captured the gunmen and paraded them up and down the street. Enmark had had quite enough of theatre that would have cast her as "dead hero" and now wanted her to be "dazed victim."

She refused to get into a stretcher, walking out of the bank instead. She was not visibly traumatized in what the public considered the appropriate way. And she was critical of the police, especially their psychiatrist, our boy Nils.

It was at that point that he made up a syndrome -- Norrmalmstorg Syndrome, for the part of the city, later Stockholm Syndrome -- on the spot, and diagnosed her with it without ever talking to her personally.

Jess Hill writes: Stockholm Syndrome is a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence, created by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.

This piece more broadly recaps the book I am reading: theconversation.com/see-what-you-m…

The worst of it is this made-up disorder has been used to discredit (mostly but not exclusively) women who live with protracted danger and make strategic decisions about how and whether to resist.

In domestic abuse (a term author Hill prefers to domestic violence), Stockholm Syndrome is a tool for keeping the focus on the victim (“why didn’t she leave”) and not the perpetrator, or the system.

Getting swamped so I am muting this. TL;DR: Stockholm Syndrome is medically not a thing, historically a transparent lie; and socially a tool for avoiding thinking about systemic violence.

Also this is a great book. g.co/kgs/DezwZz