Books like Loving to survive by Dee Graham

In 1973, three women and one man were held hostage in one of the largest banks in Stockholm by two ex-convicts. These two men threatened their lives, but also showed them kindness. Over the course of the long ordeal, the hostages came to identify with their captors, developing an emotional bond with them. They began to perceive the police, their prospective liberators, as their enemies, and their captors as their friends and a source of security. This seemingly bizarre reaction to captivity, in which the hostages and captors mutually bond to one another, has been documented in other cases as well, and has become widely known as Stockholm Syndrome. This syndrome has been the starting point for the book Loving to Survive, where the authors delve into the complex interplay between male violence against women and women's psychology. The book argues that men's violence creates ever-present and often unrecognized terror in women, which is experienced as a fear of rape by any man or as a fear of making any man angry. Women's current psychology, the authors argue, is actually a psychology of women under conditions of captivity – that is, under conditions of terror caused by male violence against women. Therefore, women's responses to men, and to male violence, resemble hostages' responses to captors.

First publish date: 1994