On Wednesday, West Australian Liberal senator Linda Reynolds, an assistant minister in the Morrison government, and Sarah Henderson, also an assistant minister, denied that the Liberal Party is anti-women. They also defended the Coalition’s merit-based system of choosing candidates.

On Thursday, marginal-seat holder Nicole Flint said her party had been incredibly supportive of women.

And yes, their comments are completely staggering; staggering because the Liberal Party’s track record on women is utterly appalling. Women hold just 20 per cent of the Coalition government’s seats – and if it loses the next election, women will hold even fewer seats because so many Liberal women hold marginal seats. Staggering because Liberal women, including Jobs and Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O’Dwyer, have admitted that the party has a woman problem. Staggering because for years, women in the Liberal Party have admitted there is a problem, including women who have begged the party to set up an organisation similar to the successful Labor program Emily’s List.

Staggering because while I am sure there are Labor men who’ve completely lost their minds and behaved badly, they haven’t yet achieved the notoriety of Barnaby Joyce, Andrew Broad, George Christensen, Craig Kelly and I could go on.

Staggering because Liberal women keep losing preselection fights to Liberal men who just don’t have the track record.

These comments are staggering – but they are also utterly understandable – and I think I have the explanation for these comments by Reynolds and Henderson. Let me take you back nearly 50 years.

In the early `70s, the case of four Swedish bank employees who’d been taken hostage and tortured over six days captured our collective imagination. As Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor of organisational leadership at graduate business school INSEAD, says in his new book on leadership, “As a way of surviving the ordeal, the captives established a misplaced form of emotional attachment with their captors.”

He reminds us of another case, media heir Patty Hearst, who was abused and raped by her kidnappers, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. After her abduction and abuse, Hearst ended up joining the group and took part in one of their robberies.

Both of these are examples of Stockholm syndrome, what Kets de Vries describes as “an extreme example of identification with the aggressor”.

And that’s what I think has happened to these two women – in Reynolds’s opinion piece in The Australian, she writes: “The party has adopted targets and all state and territory divisions are taking ­action to encourage more women into the party, to mentor them into leadership positions and eventually into preselection and parliament: the longer path but the right one.”

It’s almost as if she believes the endless droning of her male colleagues who talk about how great women are, how they are being promoted within the party, how numbers are increasing. Late last year, deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg claimed the Morrison government’s inner ministry had additional representation of women.

That turned out not to be true, according to an ABC RMIT Fact Check, which found: “Mr Frydenberg's claim ignores the fact that female representation in the current cabinet is not higher than earlier periods in Mr Turnbull's time in office. Mr Morrison currently has six women in cabinet, which is as many as there were in Mr Turnbull's cabinet for almost a year at the beginning of his tenure.”

I mean, not like it’s big numbers, 27.3 per cent at the beginning of former prime minister Turnbull’s tenure compared to 26.1 per cent now. But you can see how Reynolds has internalised this messaging. She and Henderson are just identifying with their captors.

Of course, there’s another reason Henderson and Reynolds have made these comments – they’ve made them in order to attack Bill Shorten. Reynolds claims Shorten has “shamelessly politically weaponised this issue”. She’s dead wrong on that one. She can blame just one person, Leonie Morgan, who drew the attention of women in the Labor Party to the US initiative of Emily’s List . She then worked with others, such as the sainted Joan Kirner, to make equality in the Labor Party a reality.

I’m not sure how to cure Stockholm syndrome myself. But Kets de Vries, whose book is called Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology in Everyday Life, has some ideas. He says that the “first step in breaking a pattern of victimisation is the realisation that we have fallen into the trap of identifying with the aggressor. But it is usually others who make us see the light ... one way to build up immunity ... is to band together and create a support group. Support groups can provide strength and reassurance, as well as a reality check to prevent members from identifying with the aggressor.”

I’m confident that neither Reynolds nor Henderson would pay much attention to my advice. But I’ve interviewed so many women from the Liberal Party over the years and the majority of them say the same thing, that the Liberal Party has a woman problem and it does nothing to address it.

And Sue Boyce, who retired as a Liberal senator in 2014, had the perfect cure – a support group, just like the one suggested by Kets de Vries. She had a name for it: Foundation 51. But at this rate, it will be another 51 years before the Liberal Party has anything like equal representation of women; and the apologia of Henderson and Reynolds won’t make it happen any faster.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.