Samenvatting

Everyone needs a certain degree of liberty and space to do his job right. Deprivation of liberty can have serious consequences, also for UN soldiers. Therefore psychological support during peace operations has become an absolute requirement. Over the past few years the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) has developed an integral package of psychological support measures for the soldiers and their home fronts for the periods before, during and after deployment. One of the events with which the RNLA had not been confronted before, is the taking of hostages. As this was a relatively new phenomenon, the psychological after-effect of hostage taking had not been mapped by the RLNA. As a result, its Behavioural Sciences Division started to research this field. In this article this research will be discussed.