Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Two girls who confound our expectations

Natascha and Misbah compel us to interrogate the facile assumptions we make about life and liberty

I sound as abstruse as Donald Rumsfeld with this column. "We know what we know, what we thought we knew, and now what we don't know, perhaps cannot know." Two young, vulnerable girls, thousands of miles apart, have confounded all sensible, rational expectations this past fortnight. Victims they are of adult control, but yet they are not acting like the victims of our collective fevered imagination.

Natascha Kampusch, 18, was found wandering around in Strasshof, a middle-class suburb north of Vienna. She had been lost for eight years, kidnapped aged 10 on her way to school by Wolfgang Priklopil, who had kept her in a cell which had been assiduously prepared to hold the child prisoner. On 23 August, Kampusch escaped, and on the same day Priklopil committed suicide by placing his head on a line as a train approached.

She was lucky - four of the girls in Belgium similarly incarcerated by the paedophile Marc Dutroux ended up dead. I remember seeing the film The Collector in 1965, based on the terrifying novel by John Fowles in which a maniac lepidopterist imprisons a vivacious female art student, another butterfly pinned down. It is the ultimate horror for me, worse than murder or opportunistic rape.

Kampusch grieves for the monster who may have sexually used her, who frightened her into submission, distorted her sense of reality. She feared she would die of lack of food and air. Yet she says: "He was part of my life, that's why in a certain way I am mourning him ... he carried me in his arms but also trampled me underfoot." She refuses to reveal significant facts, has stayed away from her parents, seems unnaturally calm and protective of her secrets - "that intimacy belongs only to me".

Experts say this is the Stockholm syndrome, an unnatural attachment individuals can often form with their kidnappers, but I remain unconvinced that this adequately explains the erratic behaviour of the young girl, and in particular her apparent distance from her parents who have suffered so long.

Nothing like as brutal but also as incomprehensible to many is the more recent case of 12-year-old Molly Campbell, who prefers her Muslim Pakistani name, Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana. She too was snatched on her way to school, we were told by police and her mother Louise. They accused her father Sajad, estranged from her mother and now living in Pakistan with two of their older children, who appear to have been complicit in the plot. The father did carry off the child illegally from the parent who had lawful custody, and whether coercion or persuasion was used, it is still an abduction.

There are an appalling number of such cases in Britain; they hardly ever make it into the news. Many British mothers who have children with foreign men, including those from the EU, and dual-nationality holders, find themselves bereft and helpless when their children are whisked off abroad.

But this case excited the media, partly because at first it represented the clash of warring civilisations, the resonant plotline of the 21st century. By day two, we were given to understand there was a planned forced marriage about to take place, and the tearful mother described how she had had to move from place to place to protect her daughter from just such a snatch. Mohammed Sarwar the local MP, and of Pakistani background, has shown willing to help the mother get back her child, and pressure was put on the Pakistanis who signed a protocol in 2003 to honour custody judgments made in British courts.

Only, just like Natascha, Misbah/Molly has turned a tragedy into a romance of sorts. She has reappeared inordinately happy in Lahore, with a scarf on her head, next to her married 18-year-old sister Tahmina. She says she left of her own free will to join her father in Pakistan, where she wants to live because she is happier there than with her mother and her partner. A court in Lahore has just given the father temporary custody. A child who has more choices and freedoms than she ever will in Pakistan makes the choice to leave those freedoms behind.

Britons know how to react to stories which go the other way. Outrage and pity quite rightly well up when we hear of forced marriage victims seeking autonomy and an escape from oppression or children who are beaten down by "barbaric" cultural practices. So what to make of this then? Or of Natascha's tenacious loyalty for her tormentor?

There are other connections between the two cases. Priklopil brought to his captive evidence of the "corruption" in the outside world - articles about drugs, rampant sexuality and the collapsing moral order. She was convinced by him and says: "It was true my youth was different, but I avoided having anything to do with smoking or drinking and I didn't meet the wrong friends."

Misbah tells us she didn't like the way her mother, Louise, lived after she split up with her father, a strict Muslim who had Louise wear a burqua from the age of sixteen when she went through a Muslim wedding. Since the separation she has given up Islam, smokes, drinks and cohabits with a man, all choices despised by her youngest daughter.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. Since then we have learnt a vast amount more about the impact of family dynamics on the inner lives of children. Both these girls appear to come from the bitter fallout of fractured families. (Natascha's parents are divorced too) The mothers in both cases seem to have acted in ways to alienate their daughters. Natascha's mother allegedly slapped her the day she disappeared, according to reports. Misbah complains her mother would not let her keep contact with her father and siblings. Hers may even be a rebellion against her mother making a new life and a baby with another man.

But that can't be it, at least not the whole of it. Is it partly about a search for order, rules, regulation, the comfort of authority? It may not be that different from what happens when westernised young Muslims and Europeans take refuge in the most autocratic manifestations of Islam. Or what drove Günter Grass, when he was a teenager, to become a member of Hitler's Youth Brigade?

Occidental messiahs want to spread libertine values around the globe, by force if necessary, just when many of the younger beneficiaries of this free world are repulsed and confused by these values. Natascha and Misbah are the latest symbols of this contradiction. They compel us to interrogate the facile assumptions we make about human life and liberty. Hopefully they make us a little more careful, humble and aware that modern western societies do not hold all the answers.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk