Jack Laurence

There's actually a quote from one of the original Stockholm bank robbers, the incident that gave us the term Stockholm Syndrome.

It speaks directly to this.

Years after the robbery, reflecting on why he hadn't harmed the hostages, he simply said, they made it hard to.

They made us go on living together day after day, like goats in that filth.

There was nothing to do but to get to know each other.

That is exactly what Nigel was counting on.

Hostage survival research consistently shows that those who come through captivity intact tend to contain their hostility, maintain routines, seek flexibility where they can find it, and crucially, mask any hostile reactions to their captors rather than act on them.

Nigel wasn't just surviving day to day, he was thinking ahead, building something, however fragile, however one-sided, that he hoped might one day save their lives.

And in fact, they did something even more, and would play up to the group's extreme religious ideology.

No, I mean, it's the best recruitment technique I've heard of so far.

I mean, I don't think too many people are going to argue with that one.

So it's worth pausing here to acknowledge what this moment actually was because in other hostage situations and other conflicts, conversion has been used as a weapon against captives, a tool of psychologically pressuring and humiliating.

There are accounts of hostages being offered food, better conditions, small mercies in exchange for renouncing their faith.

Many have refused at great personal cost because to them, their identity was the last thing that remained entirely their own.

However, Nigel and Amanda made the opposite calculation.

They weren't people of strong religious conviction being asked to abandon something sacred.

They were two people in an extraordinarily dangerous situation looking at every available lever that they could pull to stay alive.

And religion, specifically the deeply held religious ideology of the men holding them, was a lever.

The psychology behind this is well understood.

Hostages who sought to build reciprocal relationships with their captors through shared experiences, through acts of alignment, did so as a deliberate strategy to reduce the harshness of their captivity.