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Time and again during the 18 harrowing years she allegedly spent in captivity, Jaycee Lee Dugard must have had the chance to cry for help. She assisted her alleged abductor, Phillip Garrido, with his home business, sorting out orders by phone or e-mail. She occasionally greeted customers alone at the door. She even went out in public. But she apparently never made a run for it, returning each day instead to a shed in the backyard of the man who allegedly kidnapped and raped her. "Jaycee has strong feelings with this guy," her stepfather, Carl Probyn — who saw Dugard snatched at the age of 11 from a bus stop in 1991 — said Aug. 28. "She really feels it's almost like a marriage." (See TIME's top 10 famous disappearances.)

Baffling it may be, but Dugard's response to her years in captivity is hardly unusual. Explaining it precisely is impossible, but one of the most common theories is the so-called Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which victims display compassion for and even loyalty to their captors. It was first widely recognized after the Swedish bank robbery that gave it its name. For six days in August 1973, thieves Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson held four Stockholm bank employees hostage at gunpoint in a vault. When the victims were released, their reaction shocked the world: they hugged and kissed their captors, declaring their loyalty even as the kidnappers were carted off to jail. Though the precise origin of the term Stockholm syndrome is debated, it is often attributed to remarks during a subsequent news broadcast by the Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who had assisted the police during the robbery.

No widely accepted diagnostic criteria exist to identify Stockholm syndrome — also known as terror-bonding or traumatic bonding — and critics insist its apparent prevalence is largely a figment of the media's overactive imagination. One FBI report called such close victim-captor relationships "overemphasized, overanalyzed, overpsychologized and overpublicized." Nonetheless, the Swedish clerks' puzzling response to their ordeal has been emulated over and over again in a series of high-profile cases. When heiress Patty Hearst was abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, for example, she famously became their accomplice, adopting an assumed name and abetting the radical political group in a bank robbery.

A decade later, shortly after TWA Flight 847 took off from Athens, Greece, in 1985, two gun-toting terrorists forced their way into the cockpit, demanding that the plane touch down in Lebanon. Once on the ground, they held passengers captive, threatened them with guns and murdered one hostage, dumping his body onto the tarmac. Nonetheless, after the captives were rescued, one of them reportedly later said of his captors: "They weren't bad people; they let me eat, they let me sleep, they gave me my life."

Victims held captive for brief but intense periods aren't the only ones to display curiously positive feelings for the perpetrators. Shawn Hornbeck, a Missouri boy kidnapped and held captive by pizzeria worker Michael Devlin in 2002 for more than four years, identified himself as Shawn Devlin when he contacted the police to report a stolen bike just 10 months after his abduction — using his captor's name and giving no hint of what had happened. In an interview aired on CBS the year after Hornbeck was freed, the reporter noted that the boy's parents had requested that Shawn not be asked why he never spoke up.

Natascha Kampusch's story is perhaps even more troubling. The Austrian girl was abducted at age 10 and held for eight years in a windowless cellar by her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil. She ran away in August 2006. Yet upon learning that he had thrown himself in front of a train a few hours after she escaped, she reportedly burst into tears. "All I can say is that, bit by bit, I feel more sorry for him," Kampusch said in a 2007 documentary intended to mark her first year of freedom, calling Priklopil a "poor soul — lost and misguided." (Experts note that because they are especially vulnerable and impressionable, children may be particularly prone to forming bonds with their captors, a phenomenon that may differ from Stockholm syndrome in adults.) Victims generally stand a good chance of recovering from Stockholm syndrome, mental-health experts say, but the prognosis and road to recovery depend on the nature and intensity of the hostage situation and the victim's individual way of coping.

But as critics of Stockholm syndrome maintain, these captives were the exceptions. According to a 2007 FBI report, 73% of victims displayed no signs of such affection for their abductors. Nonetheless, crisis negotiators often actually try to encourage captor-hostage bonding by telling perpetrators about the victims' families or personal lives. Being viewed as a fellow human being, the theory goes, may be a victim's best hope for staying alive. Which means Dugard's apparent reluctance to attempt an escape may ultimately have been her ticket to freedom.