INDIVIDUALS MENACED BY STALKERS
Stalking: A New Word for an Old Problem
Stalking is a serious and pervasive crime that affects millions of Americans each year.… This dangerous and criminal behavior is still often mischaracterized as harmless.… Persistent stalking and harassment can lead to serious consequences for victims, whose lives may be upended by fear. Some victims may be forced to take extreme measures to protect themselves, such as changing jobs, relocating to a new home, or even assuming a new identity. (President Barack Obama, 2010)
Terrorists, political assassins, mob hit men, and kidnappers always have trailed and hunted down their prey before finding an opportune moment to strike. But it was not until the 1980s that the term stalking was coined and entered into every- day language. The media began to use it in the aftermath of a widely publicized attack in 1982 when an actor was repeatedly stabbed near her home by an obsessed fan; she made a movie about her ordeal to raise consciousness about this unrecognized danger. Another young actor was shot to death when she opened her door by a jeal- ously deranged admirer in 1989. Since then, this
long-standing problem plaguing celebrities and public figures, but also everyday people who are locked in conflict with particular individuals, has been rediscovered as a confrontational crime that could potentially escalate into a sexual assault, a beating, or on rare occasions even a murder.
Stalking is defined as a pattern of criminal con- duct inflicted by an offender on an unwilling target who becomes fearful for his or her own safety. The illegal acts include certain intimidating, harassing, and threatening behaviors that would make a rea- sonable person afraid of an impending attack that could inflict bodily harm. Confusion and contro- versy can arise because a neutral observer may con- sider certain perfectly legal acts as nonthreatening, such as repeated phone, e-mail, and text messages and unwanted “gifts” and unwelcome “chance” encounters that evolve into face-to-face confronta- tions. Other acts clearly could be interpreted as ominous: following at a short distance, spying on someone and taking photos or videos, tracking a person through some hidden GPS device, and con- tacting the target’s family, friends, or employers. Before an appropriate expression was devised to capture the essence of these intolerable intrusions into another’s daily life, individuals who were stalked faced a special problem: Being shadowed, hounded, and bombarded with one-sided commu- nications was not taken seriously by the authorities unless and until physical injuries were sustained. Even though threatening behavior is hard to prove and difficult to stop, in 1990 California’s leg- islature was the first to criminalize these unnerving situations. Soon after, the Los Angeles Police Department established a Threat Management Unit, the first squad specifically set up to investigate calls for help from people sensing that they were targets of an impending attack.
Two types of victim–offender relationships account for most complaints. In celebrity stalking, the first category, a well-known person (often a pop star, media personality, professional athlete, or political figure) experiences continual, unwanted interference from either a “secret admirer” or an outright enemy. These nuisance cases become highly publicized if an attack followed by an arrest
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takes place. In the second, more common, type, the target knows and is repeatedly contacted by the aggressor in a frightening way. This kind of prior- relationship stalking can materialize between pro- fessionals and their clients, employers and their employees, or former intimate partners. It can begin with benign contacts but escalate as the unde- sired attention becomes a distressing reminder of unresolved personal issues and growing hostility. Stalkers shadow their targets as they engage in rou- tine activities and linger in front of their homes, schools, or workplaces. They also might vandalize their target’s property, harm their pets, approach their children, steal their mail, and seek to get them in trouble with the law, friends, kin, land- lords, and employers.
Victims can suffer in a number of ways. If they are hunted and haunted, they may experience anxiety, panic attacks, depression, sleep distur- bances, nightmares, memory lapses, and weight loss, among other emotional and physical symp- toms. Financially, the harassment may inflict costs because of damaged possessions, lost earnings from missing work, and in extreme cases, moving expenses to relocate (OJP, 2008b).