Experts says kidnap victim's recovery will be difficult

Kidnap victim Shawn Hornbeck appeared poised and stoic in his first major television interview after his four-year abduction.

“It’s been great to be back home,” the boy told talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in an emotionless voice yesterday.

But mental health experts say the 15-year-old may still be in shock and will experience emotional turmoil as he recovers.

“That kind of deer-in-headlights look,” where he seems at least superficially happy to be back “will lead one to believe that the worst is now behind him ... where in fact that’s not the case,” said Dr Louis Kraus, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Centre.

Shawn’s alleged abductor, pizzeria worker Michael Devlin, pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges of kidnapping Ben Ownby, a 13-year-old who had been missing four days when he was found last week in Devlin’s apartment with Shawn.

Shawn said he hopes to return to “normal life” soon, back to his old school, friends and hobby of fixing cars.

Getting Shawn and Ben back into as normal a routine as possible is the difficult first step toward helping them recover, Kraus said.

Shawn’s parents told Winfrey they believe he was sexually abused. Even if he was not, the trauma of being separated from his family and kept out of school for so long will be difficult to overcome, Kraus said.

Nightmares, anxiety, anger and depression would all be “normal” reactions, especially if abuse occurred, said Dr Lynne Tan, a psychiatrist at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Centre in New York.

Shawn’s parents told Winfrey they have not pressed him to discuss his ordeal.

That is a good way to handle the situation, said psychologist Patrick Tolan, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research.

“When kids have been through something that is this shocking to their sense of security and identity, you want to take it slow,” Tolan said.

Asking the boy why he did not try to escape, and other judgmental questions, should be avoided, Tolan said.

Even if he was mistreated, Shawn may have come to identify with his captor and is probably feeling conflicted about suddenly being removed from that way of life, Tan said.

He will also probably struggle with “anger at this person for taking advantage of him, anger at himself for not fighting back, and maybe just shame and guilt,” she said.

He will also have to get used to being a celebrity of sorts, and people around him will naturally be inquisitive, Tan said.

One of the first challenges will be determining whether to put Shawn in school with younger children or special education to help him catch up. Either one could be emotionally damaging since he may not see himself as needing special help, Kraus said.

“It would be near impossible to imagine that there isn’t going to be some permanent impact on this child,” Kraus said.