A Stolen Life

Strength Perspective & Jaycee Dugard

It can be difficult to imagine how a person could stay captured for 18 years and not be able to do anything about it, but that was the case with Jaycee Dugard. As Dugard's book is appropriately titled "A Stolen Life" (2011), her life way of living was completely taken from her the day she was kidnapped. When Dugard was only eleven years old, she was captured by Phillip and Nancy Garrido, who kept her imprisoned for 18 years, being housed in their back yard and where Phillip Garrido fathered two children with Dugard. The eleven and fifteen-year-old girls were told that Dugard was indeed their sister and not their mother, since Dugard was so young. The three girls were held captive by all means. They were not allowed to interact with anyone, and they were home-schooled as a way of preventing them from further exposure to the outside world. By the time of their discovery, the eleven-year-old girl who was kidnapped, was a 29-year-old young mother of two (Dugard 2011).

It is pretty normal for an individual who was captured at such a young age and shared so much with her capturers, to form some sort of emotional bond with them. In the case of Dugard and Phillip Garrido, this bond went beyond inappropriate as it produced two innocent children into a life a misery. However, one would imagine a case such as this as being a traumatic one for Dugard's children, but that actually was not the case. They did not exhibit the stereotypical mannerisms or the quality of life that one would imagine a captured individual would have, but instead they looked like healthy, relatively well-dressed, and very well-spoken individuals. When they were separated from Garrido, they actually cried, showing signs of Stockholm syndrome, where they displayed some sort of attachment and emotional bond with the individuals who kept then captured. It was a really hard thing to go through, and getting reunited with Dugard's family was most emotional of all, but it was her strength and willingness to survive and prevail, that made everything turn out the way it did (Dugard 2011).

Knowing that in the end someone was there for Dugard made her rehabilitation possible. Focusing on the fact that she will now be able to give her daughters the things that she was never able to have due to her kidnapping, she can rest assured that everything that she went through was not gone through in vain. The strength perspective focuses on just this. It emphasizes the good in what may seem an impossible circumstance to overcome (Saleebey 2008).