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Hostage Takers in France Rarely Motivated by Religion or Ideology: Study

According to the report, the average hostage or barricade situation is carried out on a Wednesday in July by a 41-year-old French male.
Image via French Gendarmerie/Ministry of Interior

Turn on the TV and you see reports of a hostage taker, or someone who's barricaded himself inside a building, and the first thing that pops into your mind is that there's a religious or political agenda, however twisted, in the mind of the perpetrator.

But that's probably not the case, at least if it's in France, according to a report from the French National Supervisory Body on Crime and Punishment (ONDRP), a government organization, which has just published its first statistical study of hostage crises and barricading incidents.

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According to the report, while incidents with religious or political - or criminal - bases generally receive the most media hype, they only account for about 20 percent of all crisis situations. The study looked at 330 incidents that occurred in France between 2010 and 2013 (and therefore not the Charlie Hebdo attack this past January).

It turns out the average hostage taker in France is a 41-year-old male who is known to the police, knows his victims, and has premeditated the event. In 37 percent of cases, he's unemployed. Fifty-one percent of the victims are women, and their average age is 23. Seventy-four percent of the victims are French.

Hostage and barricade situations tend to occur on Wednesday in the daytime — weekends are shunned — in July. And the average length of an intervention is 6 hours and 14 minutes.

Researchers found that 24 percent of those who had barricaded themselves had done so out of "a set of symptoms linked to depression" and 23 percent of those situations had been caused by "judgment-impairing or judgment preventing" mental disorder. These are often people who have stopped treatment or are refusing to be committed to a psychiatric facility.

Criminal motives made up 16 percent of cases—the refusal to surrender to the authorities following an offense, for instance, such as an armed robbery.

Political or religious motives account for just 4 percent of these cases.

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The researchers who undertook the survey considered only situations that required the intervention of France's elite police units. And the incidents fell into three categories: a person has barricaded himself alone inside a location, the person is not alone, and hostage crises.

Speaking in the French daily Le Figaro, ONDRP director Christophe Soullez praised the inaugural survey, which he said highlighted the organization's "desire to collaborate with the special units."

Other findings include:

— Only six of the 330 situations were caused by women.

— Just 10 percent were age 25 or under.

— In just under half of the incidents, 66 percent of the offenders had consumed alcohol, 18 percent had taken drugs, and 16 percent had used both.

— While 73 percent of all recorded hostage situations had been premeditated, researchers found that only one-third of barricade situations had been planned out in advance.

— Analyzing 122 victims, researchers found that 75 percent were known to the attacker. A third of all victims suffered violence at the hands of their attackers, and six of the 122 victims did not survive the situation.

— Armed intervention is required in 59 percent of all cases, but in less than half of all hostage situations. According to the report, "Negotiation is a priority," but not always an outcome. "In 26 crisis situations, there was no negotiation attempt, either by choice, to surprise the attackers, or because there was no need," the offender having surrendered before the start of the intervention. Close to a third had surrendered following negotiations and in nine percent of cases, the offender had tried to kill himself.

— Six out of ten times, police have to deal with an armed offender. In this case, the weapon is used 44 percent of the time prior to police intervention, and 25 percent of the time during the intervention.

— Eighty-two percent of all interventions ended in arrest and out of the 330 situations surveyed for the report, only one offender died during the police intervention.

Follow Matthieu Jublin on Twitter : @MatthieuJublin

Image via French Gendarmerie/Ministry of Interior