Dominc Lawson: Private lives and public prurience

These cases illuminate how the adult world grotesquely overestimates the importance of se

Which is the more deluded man - Wolfgang Priklopil or Tony Blair? Herr Priklopil is - or rather was--the Austrian who kidnapped 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch and attempted to turn her into the hausfrau of his fantasies. Mr Blair is the man who claimed last week that he would intervene in the lives of children "pre-birth" to prevent them from becoming bad people.

Natascha Kampusch's family background was a Viennese version of the circumstances which the Prime Minister sees as the generator of the "problem children" in this country.

One of many children and stepchildren in a broken home, Natascha lived, according to one report, "on a rundown council estate where ambulances wait until midday to pick up comatose drunks, where teenagers proudly exercise their pitbulls in the overgrown playground". Her last contact with her mother had been a hard slap across the face, after she had overslept before school. Who knows how much of this family background Wolfgang Priklopil understood before he staged his long-planned kidnap? It seems unlikely that such an obsessive character would not have selected his victim carefully.

Then, over a period of eight years, Priklopil worked on Kampusch with the care and attention of the perfect social worker of Mr Blair's imagination. He bought her books to read. They listened to the radio together. He taught her to cook. He told her what wicked things went on in the big bad world from which she had been removed.

In her remarkable first press statement, Natascha Kampusch declared: "It is true that my youth was different from the youth of others, but, in principle, I don't feel I missed anything. On the contrary, there are certain things I avoided, having nothing to do with smoking and drinking to start off with, and I didn't meet the wrong friends."

After these remarks were published, every psychiatrist rung up by the press solemnly intoned that the poor girl was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. For those who have been locked away even longer than Ms Kampusch, Stockholm syndrome was invented to account for the behaviour of two women who were taken hostage for six days by a gang which raided a Stockholm branch of Sveriges Kreditbank in 1973. Although the raiders had tied sticks of dynamite around their captives, one subsequently became engaged to her assailant, and the other started a legal defence fund for the robbers.

By contrast, Natascha Kampusch's behaviour seems much less odd. She did, after all, choose to escape from Priklopil. And while she admitted to grieving over his suicide, she stated clearly that she would have wanted him to go to prison for what he did.

In its most basic meaning, the Stockholm syndrome describes the attraction - in many cases love - that the abused feels for the abuser, the controlled for the controller. If one expands the idea to its logical conclusion, then almost all children can be said to suffer from Stockholm syndrome. As children we have very little autonomy. We are, to a gradually reducing extent as we grow up, captives of our parents, who can determine outcomes to almost everything that happens in our lives. And yet we love them, even as we find their behaviour oppressive or dictatorial.

Perhaps that is the reason why Marxists have often seen the family as an instrument of oppression. They are right, in one sense. But what they fail to appreciate is that the family unit, and not the state, is the glue that prevents society from disintegrating. The New Labour Blair does appreciate that, but somehow he has retained the faith of his abandoned socialism that improvements in the character of the people can be directed by the state.

It is a more significant delusion than Wolfgang Priklopil's - that he could will someone to worship him. As Natascha Kampusch remarked in her statement: "He was not my master. I was just as strong as him. With me he had picked the wrong person and we both knew that."

Kampusch's attitude seems remarkably similar to that of Sabine Dardenne, the 12-year-old Belgian girl who was kidnapped, and sexually abused over a period of 80 days, by the paedophile Marc Dutroux. A friend of mine spoke to Dardenne not long after her ordeal, and told me that the thing that most agitated her was to be constantly spoken of as "la pauvre petite Sabine". She was repelled by the idea of being an object of sympathy, and rejected the attempts by psychiatrists to convince her that she had failed to come to terms with the horrors of her experience.

It was certainly true that Dardenne had been sexually assaulted by Dutroux in the vilest fashion. Things are not yet so clear in the case of Priklopil and Kampusch. Unlike Dutroux, who was a married man with a strong and deeply perverted sexual urge, Priklopil was a mummy's boy, who seemed, most of all, to want to find someone who would clean up and cook his meals for him when his mother was no longer able to.

In her statement, Kampusch said with a most affecting dignity: "Everybody wants to ask intimate questions, but these have nothing to do with anyone else. The private life is mine alone."

This has not stopped almost every newspaper on the planet from referring to her, almost reflexively, as "the sex-slave girl". There is an indecent smacking of lips in many such headlines, and it is entirely prurient. Were Natascha Kampusch to spell out the actual details of the sort of encounters that are being speculated about, then the tabloid press could never publish them: they are, of course, family newspapers.

Sabine Dardenne and Natascha Kampusch illuminate two things in their strikingly similar handling of the press. The first is that having been denied the most basic privacy by their captors, they were certainly not going to allow the media to steal - or indeed buy - what was left of their dignity.

The second is that the adult world grotesquely overestimates the importance of sex. I am sure that many more children have been sexually abused than are known about. I am almost as sure that such children tend to be less obsessed with such experiences than those who are charged with discovering them - or writing about them.

This is not meant to minimise the wickedness of child abusers such as Wolfgang Priklopil, but at the same time we should not forget that the thing we most want to protect - the innocence of children - is what enables them to cope with experiences which to us seem unbearable.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk