Yes, Shawn Hornbeck is Resilient

I found an article on blogcritics.org written by Lisa Albers. I am going to quote this article as it was a greatly written piece by Lisa.

Quoted Directly from blogcritics.org: "

His face is everywhere: front page of the dailies, the cover of Newsweek, next to Oprah on national television. Although 15 now, he’s still a sweet-faced boy with curly dark hair and wide eyes. He looks relieved, tired—but normal. Maybe even resilient.

Yes, there is a resiliency in Shawn, and this quality has prompted the questions. How could this capable-looking 15-year-old remain with his captor without telling the police or another adult close to him that he’d been kidnapped? Why didn’t he give them some indication of his—and Ben’s—plight?

Judging by the letters to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or reader comments on websites, many people are deeply enraged by these questions. They cry out against the way the media has abused Shawn by speculating to the point of blaming him for his captivity. Take the airing of the so-called “shocking photos” of Shawn wearing a red bandana and brandishing what appears to be a gun. St. Louis’ Fox 2 TV ran the photos with accompanying commentary that dripped with insinuation about what the photos might say about Shawn—and not about Michael Devlin, the man who admits to ripping Shawn away from his home four years ago and doing unimaginable things to him since. Fox 2 claimed the photos reveal Shawn’s “other side.”

What this “other side” might be, exactly, the newscasters would not say, perhaps out of cowardice to go that far, but more likely due to their inability to state with any conviction what the photos reveal about Shawn. Which is nothing. This is a sad commentary about the environment in which this media travesty occurred.

The photos might be those of any 15-year-old boy in America trying to cop a gang image for the camera. In St. Louis, you often hear talk on the street about the legendary gangs: the Crips and the Bloods. Shawn wears a red bandana, which might have signaled to TV newscasters an affiliation with the Bloods. St. Louis is plagued by racial tension owing to its geographic location (think Missouri Compromise) and its population, which is about 30% African American, with a European-descended majority.

Tenuous racial peace

There is an atmosphere of détente between these two cultures, a tenuous peace that can flash at a moment’s notice. Just an hour’s drive north is where Mark Twain penned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American classic that is notorious as much for its profligate use of the n-word as for its indictment of the failures of Reconstruction to bring any justice or quality of life for the freed slaves. St. Louis County long ago legally separated from St. Louis city government. White flight gutted much of St. Louis’s downtown, and the city proper is only now beginning to recover.

Thus, photos of Shawn Hornbeck in gangster garb were aired in a climate that permits racist nudge-nudging. The newscasters would not have to explicitly state what “other side” of the photos reveal about Shawn. It is assumed their viewers will “get it”. As recently as Feb. 2, in fact, the director of the St. Louis City Health Department resigned after using the n-word as a racial slur in a staff meeting in which he also apparently maligned “poor white people.”

Of course, there is the gun in that one photo of Shawn. Fox 2 TV “investigated” this aspect by interviewing one of Michael Devlin’s neighbors, who said she found it very disturbing to think that Shawn might have had a gun, because it could have gone off any time. No one asked whether Michael Devlin had a permit or questioned what kind of man would have Shawn pose with a firearm for photographs, if indeed Devlin took them. Is what Shawn holds in his hand in the photo even a real gun? It could be a paintball gun. I’ve read of several incidents of robberies being committed with them, as they look more like a real gun than does an index finger in a coat pocket.

The irony is that Shawn lived with Devlin in Kirkwood, which is a far cry from St. Louis’ mean streets. Kirkwood really is the suburbs; past gang affiliation is undoubtedly the least of Shawn’s troubles. These aren’t the affluent suburbs of St. Louis’ well-to-do (some of those townships boast the highest per capita incomes in the nation), but neither is this the urban ghetto that fearful citizens studiously avoid.

Too many in the media seek to blame the victim in this case, precisely because the truth might be far more disturbing. Wouldn’t it be comforting if Shawn was simply a wayward youth who befriended some gullible, lonely pizza store manager who let him skip school for four years, get his lip pierced, and play gangster? Then we could all go on pretending that we live in a world in which unspeakable acts committed by the nice guy at the local pizza parlor on their child victims do not occur, and with heinous frequency, and in average-looking apartment buildings in ordinary Midwest cities under the very noses of neighbors, employers, customers, and law enforcement. What’s “bizarre” about this case wasn’t Shawn himself; it’s the media’s reaction to it.

While it is understandable that some people need to believe that Shawn’s behavior during captivity points to a lack of torture or even contentedness, this is a dangerous, malicious ignorance at work.

Didn’t try to escape?

Here’s what no one wants to talk about: Perhaps Shawn didn’t try to escape for the same reason that a child whose own parent has raped him—for that is what child molestation is, rape—isn’t likely to try to escape. Children love their parents unconditionally. They are dependent upon them for comfort, identity, security and sustenance and will protect and obey a parent even in the face of the cruelest abuse or neglect. For an adult, it is remarkably easy to, first of all, win a child’s trust, especially when he’s been traumatized and scared, and second of all, to manipulate a child into doing whatever you want him to do. In the confined world of that little apartment in Kirkwood, Shawn Hornbeck was destroyed, and Shawn Devlin, Michael’s son, was born. Michael Devlin passed Shawn off as his son to anyone who saw him; he listed him as such on the lease. To Shawn’s neighborhood friends, that’s who he was.

Michael Devlin is by all accounts a nice, even likable guy. Contrary to the extreme characterizations of sex offenders in popular culture, probably most of these criminals are people whom those around them would never suspect capable of such evil. “We never knew,” the family members say. “He seemed like a regular guy,” the neighbors concur. Yet in the Devlin case there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary: He’s now admitted to stealing these two little boys from their families, and to something we call in legal terms ‘forced sodomy.’

What if Shawn, like everyone else who met Devlin, found him likable, despite the torture? More than suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, Shawn may even have felt responsible for causing his family distress for his disappearance. No weapon, not even a psychological one, is beyond the grasp of a man intent upon possessing two children. Devlin may have demanded Shawn’s help in hiding Ben Ownby, thereby making Shawn feel complicit in Devlin’s alleged crimes, though by no means was Shawn actually complicit, as the most despicable media reports have implied. The guilt Shawn may feel, no matter how irrational, may itself explain Shawn’s behavior.

Convicted sex offender

Furthermore, the NY Post uncovered this: Shawn Hornbeck’s biological father, Walter Hornbeck, now deceased, was a convicted sex offender. Walter Hornbeck was charged with rape in 1992, and though the case is sealed, the charge reportedly involved assault on a minor. Shawn was only six months old at the time, but his sisters were aged six and seven. When Shawn himself was six, Walter Hornbeck was released from prison, but according to Shawn’s stepfather, he had no contact with Shawn. What bearing, if any, this has on the kidnapping case is not yet clear, but it does warrant mention in light of Devlin’s alleged motivations and Shawn’s psychological well-being.

Although this practice is sometimes debated, most news media refrain from publishing the names of rape victims, let alone broadcasting images of them or splashing their photos across front pages and websites. They act out of respect for the victim’s privacy, recognizing that rape victims are stigmatized, and because it is well known that the possibility of public stigmatization deters victims from going to the police. It is simply astounding that the media universally failed to act with great care in the case of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby.

The excuse that newscasters were simply covering a breaking story of recovered kidnapping victims does not hold. To be fair in the extreme, before these new charges were pressed, it was remotely possible that, possession of child pornography aside, Michael Devlin had allegedly stolen Ben and Shawn because he was “lonely” and wanted only to have surrogate children - that whatever sickness drove him to keep those two boys in his custody need not necessarily encompass pedophilia.

But even so, the possibility that pedophilia was a component in Michael Devlin’s alleged motivation should have been obvious from the start. The privacy accorded to adult rape victims was egregiously denied these two children. Picture Shawn and Ben, on the cover of last week’s Newsweek under the headline, “Living With Evil.” Now, you can also imagine them as Michael Devlin’s rape victims. They’ll have to live with this man’s evil for the rest of their lives."

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