By Sharon Bernstein
May 7 (Reuters) – The three young women imprisoned for
around a decade in a white two-story house in Ohio are going to
need support and, most of all, privacy as they re-integrate into
society, survivors of other long-term kidnapping ordeals said on
Tuesday.
Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who went
missing in separate incidents about a decade ago, were found
alive on Monday in a home in the same blue-collar Cleveland
neighborhood where they had gone missing.
Three men, all brothers, have been arrested as suspects in
the case.
But even as neighbors celebrated and media from around the
world converged on the Seymour Avenue block where Berry led the
escape, survivors Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard urged people
to leave the three women alone.
“It is so important to respect their privacy, to give them
every chance they can to find their own way back, their own path
to happiness and well being,” Smart said in an interview with
ABC News on Tuesday.
Now married and an activist for missing and exploited
children, she was abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom in
Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002, at age 14. She was rescued nine
months later.
Jaycee Dugard, who was taken from a California bus stop at
age 11 and held for 18 years before she was freed in 2009, had a
similar message.
“These individuals need the opportunity to heal and connect
back into the world,” Dugard said in a statement.
She urged the women not to let their ordeals define them.
“This isn’t who they are,” Dugard said. “It is only what
happened to them.”
Their rescue, she said, “reaffirms we should never give up
hope.”
WROTE BOOK BUT GUARDS PRIVACY
Dugard wrote a book about her captivity, “A Stolen Life,”
and in 2011 filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of
failing to properly monitor and track her captor, Phillip
Garrido, a convicted sex offender.
Still, she guards her privacy. As an honoree at a dinner on
Tuesday night by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children
in Washington D.C., Dugard planned to deliver a simple, “Thank
you,” instead of a detailed speech, a spokesman said.
Rebecca Bailey, author of “Safe Kids, Smart Parents” and a
therapist who has worked with Dugard, urged the public and the
press not to speculate about what may have happened to the three
Ohio women during their imprisonment.
“Please avoid labels and conjecture in order to prevent
further stress and pressure,” she said in a statement. “For you
this is news, for them this is real life.”
Privacy, said Marsha Gilmer-Tullis, a social worker with the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, provides the
quiet space that survivors need to come to grips with what
happened to them and begin to move on.
They will undoubtedly also need help from a trained
therapist, she said.
“There are incredible complexities that are very unique to
this type of trauma,” Gilmer-Tullis said. “It really requires an
understanding of a treatment professional who can understand and
help that child or young adult move forward.”
Family members of victims have sometimes found purpose in
creating foundations to help look for missing children or
provide support to survivors, Gilmer-Tullis said.
The family of Shawn Hornbeck, who was abducted as an
11-year-old in Missouri and held for four years before he was
rescued with another boy in 2007, started a foundation to help
other missing and exploited children. Elizabeth Smart’s family
also started a foundation.
Gary Toelke, sheriff of Franklin County, Missouri, was at
the center of the investigation that led to discovery of
Hornbeck and Ben Ownby, who was abducted when he was 13.
Toelke said that he and a deputy sheriff recently attended
an Eagle Scout ceremony for Ownby, and said that he was
attending college.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Los Angeles and Tim Bross in
St. Louis.; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
