Prospectus

Issue date: 9/2/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Sacramento Bee This is a family photo of Jaycee Lee Dugard who was kidnapped in 1991. Authorities say they have found her being held captive in the backyard of a couple in Antioch, California, and in the ensuing years has had two children.

SAN JOSE, Calif.-When 14-year-old Victoria Gardner emotionally collapsed after being abducted and raped in 1968, the only remedy doctors in San Jose offered was a series of electro-shock treatments to help her forget her horrible experience. She turned them down.

Four decades later, Jaycee Dugard, the Antioch, Calif., woman abducted 18 years ago and freed this week, will have more psychological help to deal with her trauma, thanks to significant advances in the therapy field known as "recovery and reunification."

Already, a San Francisco Bay Area counselor who works with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has been tapped to help Dugard and her family through the first few days of the unexpected and long-delayed reunion.

But experts-and families with similar experiences-say it will take many years of crucial professional support to cope with victims' issues, from anger at parents for failing to keep them safe to ambivalence about their abductors. Often there's even guilt for being too paralyzed with fear to run away.

"Today, there's a lot more help, but still, the fears and nightmares will come," said Gardner, who remains troubled-41 years later-about her ordeal at the hands of a physician inside a San Jose hospital over a three-day period.

Dugard was gone for nearly two decades, and experts say she can look forward to the first stage of her recovery/reunification-which is likely to be euphoria.

"There's a honeymoon period, a sense of wild joy, like your best dream has come true," said Georgia Hilgeman-Hammond, who founded the Vanished Children's Alliance in San Jose in 1976 after her 13-month-old daughter was abducted. Her daughter was found four years later.

"But it's not 'happily ever after,' " she said. "You find out they're not the same person. There's confusion, loyalty issues, like 'Why didn't mom or dad find me sooner?' "

Dugard was 11 when she was snatched near her home near South Lake Tahoe, Calif., in 1991. On Thursday, she surfaced with the convicted sex offender who police say took her all those years ago and forced her to live in a shed and tents and to bear him two daughters.

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