STA L K E R S

and their victims

Paul E. Mullen
Michele Pathé
and

Rosemary Purcell
                                                    
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Mullen, Paul E.
Stalkers and their victims/Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell.
p. cm.
ISBN 0 521 66950 2 (pbk.)
1. Stalking. 2. Stalkers. 3. Women – Crimes against – Prevention. I. Pathé, Michele,
1959– II. Purcell, Rosemary, 1969– III. Title.
HV6594.M85 2000
362.88 – dc21 99-044607

ISBN 0 521 66950 2 paperback

Every effort has been made in preparing this book to provide accurate and up-to-date information
which is in accord with accepted standards and practice at the time of publication. Nevertheless, the
authors, editors and publisher can make no warranties that the information contained herein is totally
free from error, not least because clinical standards are constantly changing through research and regu-
lation. The authors, editors and publisher therefore disclaim all liability for direct or consequential
damages resulting from the use of material contained in this book. The reader is strongly advised to
pay careful attention to information provided by the manufacturer of any drugs or equipment that
they plan to use.
Although case histories are drawn from actual cases, every effort has been taken to disguise the iden-
tities of individuals involved.
 Contents

Acknowledgements page xi
Introduction 1

1 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour 5

Introduction 5
Defining stalking 6
Stalking as popular, legal and scientific discourses 11
The archaeology of stalking 14
The social construction of stalking 18
Conclusions 24

2 The epidemiology of stalking 26

Introduction 26
The prevalence of stalking 29
Australia 30
USA 32
Summary 36

3 The victims of stalkers 38

Introduction 38
Victim studies 39
Typology of stalking victims 45
Ex-intimates 45
Casual acquaintances and friends 47
Professional contacts 48
Workplace contacts 49
Strangers 51
v
vi Contents

The famous 55
Unusual victims 56
The impact of stalking on victims 57
Summary 64

4 Classifying stalkers 65

Introduction 65
Classifying stalking as a form of domestic violence 66
Erotomanics, love obsessionals and simple obsessionals 66
Some other classifications 70
Classification employed in this book 75
Conclusions 78

5 The rejected stalker and the resentful stalker 79

The rejected stalker 79

Clinical features 79
Relationship to other classifications 80
Personality characteristics 81
Jealousy 85
Characteristics and management of the rejected 89
The resentful stalker 90
Clinical features 90
The nature of resentment 91
Characteristics and management 96

6 The predatory stalker 98

Introduction 98
Clinical characteristics 99
Stalking in paraphilias 101
Telephone scatologia 102
Exhibitionism 104
Fetishism/voyeurism 105
Pedophilia/hebephilia 107
Sexual masochism and sadism 108
Paraphilic asphyxia (asphyxiophilia) 112
Management of the predatory stalker 114
vii Contents

7 Intimacy seekers and incompetent suitors 116

Introduction 116
Intimacy seekers 117
Clinical features 117
Management 123
Incompetent suitors 123
Clinical features 123
Management 127
Intimacy seekers versus incompetent suitors 127

8 The erotomanias and the morbid infatuations 129

Introduction 129
A history of erotomania 129
Pathologies of love 134
Pathological beliefs of being loved (erotomania) 135
Pathological infatuations (borderline erotomania) 138
Primary and symptomatic forms of erotomania 143
The object of affection 153
Prevalence 154
Management and prognosis 154

9 Same gender stalking 157

Introduction 157
Media reports of same gender stalking 158
Case reports of same gender erotomania 158
Studies of stalkers and stalking victims 161
Victims of same gender stalking 169
Summary 171

10 Stalking by proxy 173

Private detectives 173

Ordering or cancelling goods and services 175
Friends and family 176
The criminal justice system 176
The medical profession 180
The Church 180
viii Contents

Real-estate agents 181

Psychics 181
Motor vehicles 181
The media 182
The Internet 183
Conclusions 185

11 False victims of stalking 187

Introduction 187
Typology of false stalking victims 191
Stalkers who claim to be victims 191
Delusions of being stalked 193
The previously stalked 194
The factitious disorder 196
The malingerer 198
Assessment and management of false stalking victims 202
Summary 204

12 Stalking and assault 205

Introduction 205
Erotomania and assault 206
Female harassment and assault 209
Stalking and assault 209
Attacks on pets 215
Homicidal behaviour and stalking 216
Risk factors and risk management 217
Conclusions 220

13 Reducing the impact of stalking 221

Introduction 221
Preventative approaches 222
Recognizing the would-be stalker 222
Declining and terminating relationships 223
Protecting personal information 224
Celebrity victims 225
Strategies to combat stalking 225
Informing others 226
ix Contents

Helping agencies 226

Avoiding contact and confrontations 228
Documentation 230
Telephone harassment 231
Restraining orders 232
Self-defence training 234
Workplace practices 235
Other security measures 237
Clinical management of stalking victims 237
Education and supportive counselling 237
Cognitive-behavioural approaches 239
Pharmacotherapies 241
Family/partner therapies 243
Group therapies 243
Support organizations for stalking victims 244
Associated issues in treatment 246
Conclusions 247

14 Defining and prosecuting the offence of stalking 249

Introduction 249
Early attempts to prosecute stalking-related behaviours 251
The development of anti-stalking legislation 255
The act 256
The threat 257
The intent 257
Other elements 259
Stalking statutes in other US states and Canada 260
Florida 260
Illinois 261
Michigan 262
West Virginia 262
Canada 262
Summary 263
The constitutionality of anti-stalking laws in the USA 263
The model anti-stalking code for American states 266
North American anti-stalking laws: a summary 267
Australian anti-stalking legislation 268
Conduct requirements 269
Intention 270
x Contents

The response of the victim 270

Penalties 271
Exemptions or defences against a charge 271
Special provisions 271
Summary of Australian anti-stalking legislation 272
The United Kingdom: the Protection from Harassment Act 273
The prosecution of stalking: summary and conclusions 276

15 Assessing and managing the stalker 279

Introduction 279
Assessment 281
Management 284
Management of any continuing mental disorder 284
Management strategies targeted at the stalking behaviours 285
Conclusions 288

Appendix A: Victim services 289

Appendix B: Important anti-stalking Acts/statutes 291
Legal cases and references 292

Index 305
 1

Stalking – a new categorization of human

behaviour

Le grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul. La Bruyère1

Introduction

Stalkers and stalking are words that have acquired new connotations by being
increasingly applied to individuals who persistently pursue, or otherwise intrude
on, others. Stalking has emerged as a social problem that not only commands con-
siderable public attention but is now, in many jurisdictions, a specific form of crim-
inal offence. Stalking is increasingly attracting clinical and research interest among
behavioural scientists and mental health professionals.
The word ‘stalk’ has the meaning of both the act of following one’s prey and
walking stealthily. To label someone a stalker has been, at least from the sixteenth
century, to imply that he or she is a prowler or a poacher (Oxford English Dictionary,
1971). When the media appropriated the word to describe those who pestered and
harassed others they provided a new focus for this ancient indictment.
‘Stalking’ is now part of our culture’s language. It has become a category with
which we describe and understand our experiences. If someone is repeatedly fol-
lowed by a stranger, or is distressed at receiving numerous unwanted letters from
an estranged partner then, in today’s world, they are likely to describe themselves
as being stalked. Looking back over their life they may now recall having been
stalked in the past. At the time they might have described the experience as having
been persistently pestered but now, retrospectively, it is recognized as their having
been stalked.
This is not just the substitution of one word for another. Stalking and being
stalked are constructs with particular implications and resonance. Stalking is now
a warning of future violence. Stalking is a cause of psychological damage. Stalking
is a form of victimization. Stalkers are dangerous. Stalkers are criminals. Stalkers are
disturbed and unpredictable. Stalking implies the inflicting of distress and damage

1
Quoted at the beginning of Edgar Allen Poe’s (1967/1840). The Man of the Crowd. [This greatest of misfor-
tunes, not being able to be alone.]

5
6 Stalkers and their victims

(whether or not the perpetrator consciously intends such damage). Being stalked
evokes the self-perception of being violated and hurt. In attributing to ourselves the
experience of being stalked (and occasionally of being, or having been, a stalker) we
potentially change our evaluation of ourselves. We change our moral judgement of
what is occurring. There is an alteration in our expectations of what will happen
and what we have a right to expect from society. The question of whether this
reframing is ‘a good thing’ is not at issue here; the concern is recognizing the poten-
tial changes inherent in the emergence of stalking as a social category. The experi-
ence of certain types of interaction and certain forms of relatedness have been
changed forever.
The capacity of new social constructs such as stalking to reframe the past so as to
endow it with new meanings and new resonance is not confined to personal experi-
ence. The rediscovery and publishing of the long ignored first novel of Louisa May
Alcott (1832–1888) provides a curious illustration of this phenomenon. A Long Fatal
Love Chase (1997) was written in 1866, two years prior to Little Women. The plot
involves the protracted pursuit of the heroine, Rosamond, by her estranged
husband. When Rosamond flees her marriage as a result of discovering both his
polygamy and murderous past, he refuses to accept that the relationship is at an end.
His reaction is initially portrayed as a desire for reconciliation and a wish to continue
their relationship. As she continues to try to escape him he becomes increasingly
resentful and angry: ‘with his own unabated passion was now mingled a resentful
desire to make her expiate her contempt by fresh humiliation or suffering’ (ibid., p.
329). The novel climaxes with the murder of Rosamond and the suicide of her killer
who dies uttering ‘mine first – mine last – mine even in the grave!’ (ibid., p 346).
According to its editor, this overheated example of the gothic languished in a uni-
versity library until resuscitated and published in 1993. It re-emerged as a tale of
stalking. On the cover of the paperback version appears the following, ‘He stalked
her every step – for she had become his obsession’. Inside the book are numerous
endorsements and quotes from reviews including that from USA Today, ‘A tale of
obsessive love, stalking and murder that seems ripped off today’s tabloids’.
Although it might be more correct to say today’s tabloids have endowed this nine-
teenth century novel not only with new relevance but with new meaning and a new
relationship to our culture’s current preoccupations.

Defining stalking

Meloy & Gothard (1995, p. 259), defined stalking, or as they prefer to call it obses-
sional following, as ‘an abnormal or long term pattern of threat or harassment
directed toward a specific individual’. The pattern of threat or harassment was
7 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

further clarified as being ‘more than one overt act of unwanted pursuit of the victim
that was perceived by the victim as being harassing’, although more than one may
seem a generous rendering of a long-term pattern. Meloy (1998b) further states
that in distinction to legal definitions, which are set forth to define and prosecute
criminal behaviour, this definition was designed to further scientific investigation
and clinical understanding. The advantage of this definition is that it directs atten-
tion to actions that are repeated and are perceived as unwanted by the object of
these attentions. A further potential strength of this definition is that, disavowals
notwithstanding, it closely parallels many of the statutory definitions of the offence
of stalking.
Pathé & Mullen (1997, p. 12) defined stalking as ‘a constellation of behaviours in
which one individual inflicts on another repeated unwanted intrusions and com-
munications’. The intrusions are further characterized as ‘following, loitering
nearby, maintaining surveillance and making approaches’ and the communications
via ‘letter, the telephone, electronic mail, graffiti or notes attached, for example, to
the victim’s car’. The authors added that, although not part of the core and defining
behaviours, there were the associated activities of ordering goods on the victim’s
behalf, interfering with their property, making false accusations, issuing threats and
in some cases assaulting the victim. Pathé & Mullen (1997) attempted a definition
that can be operationalized and depends on observable activities, with the
qualification that the activities be unwanted by the victim. It defines a course of
conduct but, as it stands, offers no temporal or numerical limits to that conduct. In
a subsequent publication, the authors suggested that, to constitute stalking, the
behaviour should consist of at least ten separate intrusions and/or communica-
tions, the conduct spanning a period of at least four weeks (Mullen et al., 1999).
This was an intentionally conservative set of limitations which ensured that the
study group were unequivocally stalkers.
Westrup & Fremouw (1998) noted a conspicuous lack of agreement among
definitions of stalking in the literature. They are of the view that the term stalking
is employed indiscriminately to cover both a class of behaviours and the specific act
of following someone. Westrup (1998) called for a clear definition of stalking, with
precise inclusion criteria comparable with those provided in the fourth edition of
the American Psychiatric Association, (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM). Westrup (1998, p. 276) proposed the following definition:
‘stalking behaviour is one or more of a constellation of behaviours that (a) are
directed repeatedly towards a specific individual (the target); (b) are experienced
by the target as unwelcome and intrusive, and (c) are reported to trigger fear or
concern in the target’. In their paper Westrup & Fremouw castigated virtually all
existing literature, noting: ‘Our comprehension of stalking behaviour has not been
8 Stalkers and their victims

appreciably increased from these efforts’ (ibid., p, 269). They offered as a solution
a functional analytical approach which in the future could potentially clarify the
antecedent conditions for a stalking event, the overt behaviour engaged in by, and
the reinforcing consequences for, the stalker which tend to encourage repetition. In
individual cases this approach offers a prospect of intervening to modify the con-
trolling variables that sustain stalking behaviours.
Given that most definitions emphasize that the course of conduct constituting
stalking be a pattern or repeated actions, the behaviour must occur on more than
one occasion, but how many more times than one? Meloy & Gothard (1995) opted
for two or more instances and in this they are in accord with most statutory
definitions of the crime of stalking (for a full discussion of the legal discourse on
stalking, see Chapter 14). Thus the ex-partner who makes a second unwanted
phone call enters the ranks of stalkers. Equally, so does the hopeful suitor who puts
himself for a second time in the way of the woman he desires, if as a result she feels
harassed. The problem with such a low threshold is that it leaves little if any gap
between stalking and those behaviours that may well be irritating but are certainly
extremely common. By placing the lower end of the spectrum of stalking so close
to many mundane activities, one captures a very wide range of commonplace beha-
viours. On the other hand why shouldn’t a woman followed home by a strange man
on two sequential nights be eligible to claim that she is a victim of stalking?
The impetus to cast the net as widely as possible in defining stalking reflects at
least three influences. The first is the tendency noted by Westrup (1998) to conflate
stalking as a description of surreptitious following, with stalking as the overarch-
ing term for a variety of unwanted attempts to maintain contact. Being followed on
one occasion is, for most of us, an unsettling experience and when it is repeated
most reasonable people would become concerned about their safety. This is all the
more so if the follower is a man, unknown, or worse still, known to hold a grudge.
Secondly, stalking is constructed, particularly by law enforcement agencies, as a
warning sign of imminent violence. If stalking is viewed primarily as the harbinger
of assault then the quicker it is recognized and responded to the better. The third
influence is that more than once seems less arbitrary than more than five, more
than ten, more than seventeen times. Nobody would want to advise a terrified
victim who has had a man stand outside the house looking up at the window on
nine consecutive nights that, according to Mullen et al. (1999), there was another
night to go before he or she could lay claim to being stalked. Central to the concern
not to place an inevitably arbitrary barrier to the recognition and potential
response to stalking is the proper concern to respond to fear and distress in a poten-
tial victim.
The resolution of the dilemma of the threshold for the number of intrusions that
constitute stalking should, we believe, be a function of the purpose for which the
9 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

behaviours are being labelled as stalking. The law may plausibly claim a need, in
pursuit of public safety, to respond promptly to the first signs of risk. Given the all
too often tardy and partial responses of police and the courts to even gross and
extended stalking activities, anxieties about overreaction may seem misplaced. It
should be noted, however, that the low threshold for committing a stalking offence
tempts police to use this as a so called ‘loading’ charge to add to other offences. We
have seen at our clinic a number of men charged with stalking in association with
child molestation offences, where the so-called stalking was integral to the sexual
offence. One man was charged with stalking on the basis of following a child
around a playground and subsequently approaching the child in the street, where
he exposed himself. The two approaches were enough to trigger the stalking charge,
which in our jurisdiction (Victoria, Australia) carries a potential sentence many
times greater than that for the indecent act of exhibitionism. Although the child
molester’s plight may evoke little sympathy, the use of anti-stalking laws in this
context risks diluting their effectiveness in situations where no other legal protec-
tions exist. If penalties for indecent exposure to children are inadequate the solu-
tion is to change the penalty. Inappropriately employing anti-stalking laws that are
still in the process of having their role and scope determined by the criminal justice
system puts in jeopardy reforms whose purpose was to extend protection to a pre-
viously ignored group of victims.
If we place only brief time constraints on behaviour constituting stalking, then
walking past someone and looking at them on three or four occasions in the space
of an hour or so at, for example, an open air market could conceivably be construed
as stalking. Equally, to return to our example of the nocturnal observer outside the
front gate, is it reasonable to deny the protection of the law until four weeks have
elapsed?
It would be comforting to believe that common sense would arbitrate between
irritating but broadly sanctioned behaviours and those that are sufficiently intru-
sive and so potentially fear-inducing to justify their being labelled, and potentially
prosecuted, as stalking. But such common sense depends on shared common
values. It is at least arguable that the emergence of stalking as an issue reflects a
process of change, if not fragmentation, in our culture’s previously shared notions
of privacy, personal safety and the proper limits on the forms of contact and
approach sanctioned by courtship and even marriage. Central to the construction
of stalking are the perceptions of the person who is the object of the unwanted
attentions that these behaviours are harassing and frightening. It is not the inten-
tions of the putative stalker that are the defining element but the reactions of the
recipients of the unwanted attentions who, in the act of experiencing themselves as
victimized, create a stalking event.
In the final analysis, stalking lies in the eye of the beholder. Stalking is those
10 Stalkers and their victims

repeated acts, experienced as unpleasantly intrusive, which create apprehension

and can be understood by a reasonable fellow citizen (the ordinary man or woman)
to be grounds for becoming fearful. A case example will illustrate the extent to
which perpetrator and victim may construct the behaviours differently.

Case example
When first seen, Mr C was in prison on remand for charges relating to the stalking of his ex-
wife. His imprisonment had followed the repeated phoning and approaching of his ex-wife,
despite both his bail conditions and a previous court order, which specifically forbade such
contact. He was a practising Catholic, had been married for five years and there was one
child. He regarded marriage as a permanent union. From his perspective he had fulfilled all
his obligations to his wife and child; he had worked long hours to provide a substantial
income; he had never, whilst they were together, been threatening let alone violent. He
believed he had always been loving and considerate, and he had never even looked at
another woman. He had complied, albeit reluctantly, when his wife asked him to move out
of the marital home for what he claimed she said would be a brief period because she
‘needed space’ and had ‘some personal issues’. When, however, a few weeks later she had
indicated that she wished the separation to become permanent, he described himself as
devastated. He saw his behaviour over the subsequent year as reasonable and constituting
legitimate attempts to attain a reconciliation with his ex-wife.
He claimed his repeated phone calls and multiple attempts to approach his wife simply
indicated how important she was to him and how enthusiastic he was for a reconciliation.
Following her and watching the house at night were in his view the natural result of her
seeing another man with sufficient frequency to stimulate in him fears about her fidelity. He
acknowledged that on occasions he had become enraged by his wife’s repeated rejections
of his advances and that he had several times threatened her and on one occasion torn up
the garden fence when refused entry to the house. Although he was prepared to accept that
he should not have lost control, he was firmly of the view that any reasonable man in his
position would have been likely to have responded similarly. Mr C is an enormous man
standing over two metres tall and weighing more than 120 kg but, in his view, he could not
be held responsible for his size and it was of no relevance to whether he might have been
seen as intimidating. Mr C was an intelligent man who was perfectly capable of calculating
his own advantage. Despite this he had given the magistrate, who told him he must not con-
tinue trying to contact his ex-wife, an extended and forceful lecture on the magistrate’s
moral failings in trying to put asunder those whom God had joined. At a later stage he gave
the Parole Board a similar piece of his mind. Such outbursts, he was aware, virtually guar-
anteed his detention but he felt he could not in all decency refrain.
Mr C’s ex-wife’s perspective was clear from her various statements to police and from two
thorough victim-impact reports prepared as part of the court’s consideration of sentencing
options. She had been initially attracted to Mr C because he seemed so strong and stable
and at that time in her life, following the breakdown of a previous relationship, these had
11 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

been important qualities. She stated that she had wanted them to live together but she had
acquiesced in his wishes for marriage. From her perspective the relationship had soon foun-
dered as she was exposed to the extent of Mr C’s demanding dependence. She stated that
she felt as if she had a family of two small children, not one. She described repeated
attempts to negotiate a separation which Mr C had ignored, threatening suicide should she
leave. Her statements did not attempt to hide that she had established a new relationship
with an old boyfriend prior to finally persuading Mr C to move out. Nor did she deny that
she had managed finally to evict Mr C by misleading him into believing that this was a tem-
porary separation. Equally clear was the devastating impact of Mr C’s repeated intrusions on
his ex-wife. She was terrified. She described barricading herself in her house, never going
out without an escort, being too frightened to answer the phone, being constantly vigilant,
expecting yet another intrusion. She reported fearing not only for her own life but for that
of her child. She had broken off her relationship with the other man for fear of further pro-
voking Mr C. She now lived the life of a recluse. She was for the first time in her life using
sleeping tablets and had been prescribed antidepressants.
Over the subsequent two years, Mr C spent several periods in prison and made two
serious suicide attempts. His ex-wife finally fled to another state, changing her name, break-
ing off all contact with friends and family and attempting to ‘disappear’. Two lives were dev-
astated and that ignores the possible impact on their child. Mr C’s sense of entitlement to
his wife and child are unchanged. He still believes he acted in the only ways open to him.

This was a clear case of stalking in the context of a relationship breakdown. Mr

C’s behaviour was not only illegal but would be likely to have been regarded by most
of his fellow citizens as unconscionable. Not so long ago, however, in most Western
societies it would have been the ex-wife’s behaviour that would have been likely to
have attracted most criticism, if not frank outrage. There are still many societies in
which the premises that Mr C appealed to in justification of his behaviour would
find considerable resonance among established practice and even legal entitle-
ments. Stalking is new, partly because of changes in our society’s understanding of
the nature of the relationship between people.

Stalking as popular, legal and scientific discourses

Initially the term stalking was used by the media to describe the behaviour of the
unwanted followers of the famous. It was later extended to include those who
harassed ex-partners, co-workers, casual acquaintances and a whole range of
fellow citizens. The intense media attention that stalking and stalkers has attracted
in the last decade has generated a public consciousness and concern which has
found political expression in a series of anti-stalking laws. The first such law was
enacted in California, the other states in the union, the sole exception being Maine,
clamouring to follow suit. Currently, most Western nations have either passed
12 Stalkers and their victims

anti-stalking laws or are in the process of doing so. The legal definitions of stalk-
ing are often framed in response to local preoccupations, be it with protecting the
famous, preventing the harassment of ex-partners or strengthening the laws
against persistent nuisance. The emergence of what has amounted to a new cate-
gory of criminal behaviour in its turn has generated interest amongst mental
health professionals and behavioural scientists, particularly those working within
the criminal justice area and forensic mental health services.
In the last decade stalking has generated three areas of discussion, almost simul-
taneously: a legal discourse, particularly around how to define the offence of stalk-
ing; a popular discourse carried forward with no signs of flagging interest, not only
in the media but through novels, films and television drama; and finally there is
emerging a scientific discourse. The scientific discourse initially focussed on the
nature and motivations of stalkers and latterly on the reactions of the victims and
the impact of being stalked on their health and safety. This emergence of a new way
of describing and talking about the world provides an opportunity to examine how
these popular, legal and scientific discourses have developed and interacted, and in
turn how they have created new categories of fear, crime and scientific study. The
rapid acceptance of the word’s new connotations and purpose was in large part
because the categories of stalking and stalker filled a need that, if not perceived pre-
viously, became obvious once coined and accepted. It defined an area of human
behaviour that caused distress to others. The behaviour itself is not new but once
labelled could in rapid succession be discussed, defined, prohibited and studied. In
short, the coining of the word ‘stalking’ and its establishment as a significant social
problem allowed us to recognize and act upon a previously unregarded area of
human activity.
Stalking, like any form of complex human activity, can be the end point of a
range of intentions and influences. Similarly, like many other forms of behaviour
that cause distress to others, it forms the extreme end of a spectrum of activities
ranging from the usually welcomed and mundane to the terrifying and fortu-
nately rare. One of the consequences of the identification and naming of stalking
as a form of deviance has been to focus attention on which types of related beha-
viour are, in current society, acceptable, questionable or to be outlawed. The
carving off of certain forms of activity usually aimed at establishing or maintain-
ing interpersonal contact as not only unacceptable but criminal and deviant has
occurred with scant discussion of boundary problems except in law journals.
Little attempt has been made to reconcile the emerging ideas of what constitutes
stalking with what in marginal cases amounts to a disjunction between the inten-
tions and attitudes of those involved in establishing a relationship or negotiating
an end to a relationship. The legal literature has focussed extensively on legitimate
versus criminal following and intrusion, as well as subjective versus objective
13 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

definitions of offending. This has, however, been strictly within discussions of

legal process and the framing of effective legislation. In part the uncritical accep-
tance of stalking as a social evil has been because initially the actions so described
were obviously dangerous to the victim. Prominent among the first well-
publicised cases of stalking were examples in which victims were eventually mur-
dered by their stalkers. That many stalkers are at best a distressing nuisance and
at worst dangerous is beyond dispute, but this still leaves unresolved the boun-
dary issues. In, for example, an ex-partner, where is the line that divides the
acceptable pursuit of reconciliation and the stalking of that erstwhile love? In the
would-be suitor, how many phone calls denote enthusiasm and how many stalk-
ing? In the dismissed worker, how many angry letters and enquiries constitute the
legitimate pursuit of clarification and assertion of rights and how many stalking?
This book not only attempts to describe unequivocally damaging stalking behavi-
ours but examines the boundaries and continuities between stalking and related
forms of human behaviour.
Stalking is a problem because it evokes, in the object of the unwanted attention,
distress and on occasion fear. There are real grounds in some cases for the victims
to fear for their physical safety, and even their lives. Equally, there are good reasons
to suppose that the disruptions produced by persistent stalking will have deleteri-
ous effects on a victim’s mental health. It should not be forgotten that the lives of
the stalkers are also severely disrupted by their actions. At the root of much stalk-
ing lie such states as loneliness, the pain of loss, nostalgia and the longing for inti-
macy. This is not to excuse or to argue for some equivalence of suffering, merely to
state the obvious: in many cases of stalking, both victim and perpetrator have
everything to gain from resolution and an end to the behaviour. The successful
management of stalking, it is argued in this book, requires that the stalker be
exposed to an appropriate balance of therapeutic help and legal sanction. For some,
such as the individual with erotomanic delusions, treatment is paramount. In the
calculating and vengeful ex-partner, confrontation with the personal costs of con-
tinuing to stalk, in terms of legal consequences, can have a gratifyingly salutary
influence. For most stalkers a mixture of treatment and external control is optimal.
Victims, even if the burden of the stalking has been relieved, are often left
sufficiently traumatized to be in need of considerable help. In those still being
stalked, practical help and appropriate support may go some way to relieving the
burden and speeding its removal.
The question of how certain activities come to be identified as stalking has only
occasionally been directly considered. As already emphasized, it is the victim who
ultimately defines stalking, but what are the cues for recognizing oneself as being
stalked?
Emerson et al. (1998) attempted to address this question by considering stalking
14 Stalkers and their victims

as a social process. They based their analysis on a variety of accounts of individu-

als who had been followed and harassed. They argued ‘stalking is keyed to a variety
of hitches and disjunctures surrounding relational coming together and splitting
apart’ (ibid., p. 295). What they describe as the ‘core dynamic’ is a one-sided
attempt to create or sustain a close relationship. Central is the notion of one party
being indifferent or opposed to the establishing, or re-establishing, of a relation-
ship with the other eager for such an outcome.
Many intimate relationships begin with the meeting of strangers. The encoun-
ter with another person who is either previously unknown or largely unregarded
is a common but none the less frequently charged event. This is particularly true
when the context is one that promises the beginning of an important relationship.
As we move from encountering someone to relating to that person we travel across
a complex social and interpersonal minefield. Traversing the pitfalls that lie
between encountering and relating is rarely straightforward. The opportunities
are many, not just for failure but for producing unsolicited responses of anger or
fear. Perceiving the other as intrusive and harassing, and oneself as stalked, is a
measure of the experienced disjunction between the intentions and perceptions of
the protagonist of the relationship and that of the unwilling object of those aspi-
rations. When intimate relationships founder and fail, one partner usually per-
ceives (or even pursues) the imminent termination before the other. Again this is
fruitful ground for those disjunctions that make possible the self-definitions of
being a stalking victim. In the quest for a new intimacy the initiator risks being
defined as a stalker. In the dissolution of intimacy it is the initiator of the break-
up who risks provoking a response in which they experience themselves as a stalk-
ing victim.
Each and every struggle toward, or away from, intimacy does not inevitably
occur under the threat of the evocation of the label ‘stalking’. Any unlucky individ-
ual could find themselves accused of being a stalker by an oversensitive, overanx-
ious or even self-serving target of their affections. In practice, however, most
reasonable individuals give a fair degree of latitude to those whose advances they
intend to resist or reject. Sometimes that generosity stems from guilt, sometimes
from sympathy, occasionally from simple politeness, but it is usually offered. In
most cases the pursuers need to be possessed of a good dose of insensitivity and an
overwhelming sense of entitlement to place themselves at risk of their behaviour
being construed as stalking.

The archaeology of stalking

The emergence of stalking as a term for a particularly egregious form of harassment

has clarified and specified the possible perspectives from which repeated unwanted
intrusions can properly be viewed. It has also constrained the extent to which
15 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

similar behaviours can be presented in a positive light. One construction of courtly

love was the unrequited love of the persistent suitor who merely admired from afar
the unattainable perfections of the loved one (see Singer, 1984).
The great Italian poets Petrarch (1304–1374) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
both celebrated in their works life-long devotions to women with whom they had
had little or no actual contact. Dante writes of his love of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova
(circa 1292). Although some have held Beatrice to be a symbol she is usually
identified with Beatrice Portinari. For Dante she is ‘an abstract, almost allegorical,
embodiment of beauty, goodness and the other perfections’ (Singer 1984, p. 156).
T. S. Eliot (1930) regarded Dante as having a pathological obsession with Beatrice,
with whom he had no real contact but nevertheless used her as the focus and inspi-
ration of his idealized love. Petrarch had a similar infatuation and idealized love for
Laura (thought to be Laura de Noves, married 1325 died 1348, the mother of eleven
children). It is not the reality of Beatrice or Laura but entirely their imagined prop-
erties that moves these poets. De Rougemont (1950, p. 178) wrote: ‘but here again
the woman, whether absent or present, is never but the occasion for a torment he
cherishes above all else’. Petrarch wrote of Laura: ‘I know to follow while I flee my
fire: I freeze when present: absent my desire is hot’ (quoted in de Rougemont,
1950). We do not know in what manner Dante pursued his Beatrice (though the
Pre-Raphaelites portray him as furtively spying). It is not known whether Laura felt
harassed by Petrarch’s 365 daily poems, assuming he sent them to their inspiration
(number 366 was dedicated to the Virgin Mary). What is clear is that for their con-
temporaries, and for many generations to come, Dante and Petrarch pursuing loves
that took no account of the realities or feelings of the beloved were a subject not of
scandal but of admiration. Western society at that period accepted as an ideal an
autistic love constructed by a man out of projections and fantasies that took no
account of the realities of the actual woman.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher, theologian and
founder member of the existential elite, wrote a curious collection of pieces pub-
lished as Either/Or (1987/1843). The first volume, Either, is ostensibly written by
‘A,’ a young self-styled aesthete and includes the narrative The Seducer’s Diary. This
is said to be the fictionalized account of Kierkegaard’s pursuit of a young woman,
Regine Olsen, renamed Cordelia Wahl in the book. The pursuit consists of surrep-
titious following, spying upon her, gathering information about her and engineer-
ing repeated encounters in public places. Kierkegaard in the fictionalized account
describes his (or A’s) first contact with the supposed beloved as follows.
A figure appears, enveloped to the eyes in a cape. It is not possible to see where he is coming
from . . . He passes by you just as you are entering the front door. At precisely the crucial
moment a sidelong glance falls on its object. You blush; your bosom is too full to unburden
itself in a single breath. There is indignation in your glance, a proud contempt. There is a
plea, a tear in your eye, both are equally beautiful. I accept them both with equal right . . . I
16 Stalkers and their victims

certainly shall meet her again sometime; I certainly shall recognize her, and she may recog-
nize me – my sidelong glance is not forgotten so easily . . . I promise she will recall the situ-
ation. No impatience no greediness – everything will be relished in slow draughts; she is
selected, she will be overtaken. (Kierkegaard, 1987/1843, pp. 314–315)
In the author’s mind a relationship is created in the moment of eye contact. It is for
him an exchange. An exchange of vows, a moment of recognition and reciprocity.
The ‘she may recognize me’ at some time in the future is rapidly superseded by ‘she
will recall the situation’. The relationship is established, albeit autistically. His claim
‘she is selected, she will be overtaken’ takes no account of her; it is a statement of
entitlement.
The relationship established is for A one of worship and service: ‘my beautiful
stranger . . . I am at your service in every way’ (Kierkegaard, 1987/1843, p. 320).
There is a recognition that at least in the first few weeks there is no real reciprocity,
only the hope and expectation of a favourable response: ‘in a certain sense my
profits are meagre but then I do have the prospect of the grand prize’ (ibid., p. 326).
The course of the following manufactured contracts and information gathering are
documented in the account, which is in the form of a diary. He follows her ‘with
the intention of passing by her and dropping behind her many times until I discov-
ered where she lived’ (ibid., p. 333). He spies: ‘I will know who you are – why else
do you think the police keep census records?’ (ibid., p. 327). He watches her house:
‘Today I learned something about the house into which she disappeared’ (ibid., p.
337) and plans, for ‘if it is necessary for me to gain entrance to the house . . . I am
prepared’ (ibid., p. 338).
The behaviours appear to us to be those of stalking, although this is not how
either Kierkegaard or his contemporaries would have constructed this story, even
assuming the vocabulary existed for such a labelling. Even more interesting is the
description of A’s internal world as he creates for himself an intimate relationship.
First there is the fantasy of the loved one’s inevitable succumbing. Then he bestows
on her characteristics, desires and intentions in a vacuum, for at this stage he knows
only her appearance and the appearance of her house. She ‘lives in a world of
fantasy’ (ibid., p. 341). He is convinced that ‘she is an isolated person’ (ibid., p. 339),
that she is ‘proud’ (ibid., p. 342), she has ‘imagination, spirit, passion’ and even
‘maybe at particular moments she wishes that she were not a girl but a man’ (ibid.,
p. 343). It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the beloved is being constructed,
or reconstructed, in the image of the lover. A rich world is created out of glimpsed
moments and stolen observations. The Seducer’s Diary seems a window into the
world of one particular type of person we would now call a stalker.
But is Kierkegaard’s account really that of stalking, and to what extent is it, as is
often assumed, a true account of his initial pursuit of Regine Olsen? Regine Olsen
did eventually have an actual relationship with Kierkegaard, although it did not
17 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

last. She survived him, living until 1904 and becoming a celebrity on the basis of
The Seducer’s Diary. Her later memories of Kierkegaard are not those of the stalker
but of the man she eventually met and to whom for a time she was engaged.
Kierkegaard remained preoccupied (obsessed even) with Regine for the rest of his
life and even in his last will and testament claimed ‘my estate is her [Regine’s] due
exactly as if I had been married to her’ (Kierkegaard, 1996 p. 657). The extent to
which The Seducer’s Diary accurately portrays the actions and mental life of
Kierkegaard in his early pursuit of Regine Olsen must remain questionable. It could
be more fictional than factual, it could conflate (or even transpose) other episodes
of such stalking-like behaviour. Kierkegaard (1996, p. 417) claimed: ‘The Seducer’s
Diary was written for her sake, to help repulse her’. What it does unquestionably is
provide an insight into the thinking and behaviour of someone whom we would
now label a stalker. At the time, however, A could have legitimately, in the eyes of
his culture and his contemporaries, styled himself a lover.
We do not know the impact on the victim, who must, to some extent, have been
aware of the undeclared observer. If this is an account of the stalking of Ms Olsen
it is difficult retrospectively to view her as unduly disturbed, let alone traumatized,
given that she later accepted his attentions and offer of marriage and given that she
accepted, in later life, the role of the great philosopher’s great love. We would spec-
ulate that the experience of being followed and spied upon would have been expe-
rienced very differently for Regine Olsen in the Copenhagen of the mid-nineteenth
century than it would be by a teenager (she was 16 or 17 years old) in London or
New York at the end of the twentieth century. The man, though unknown, would
not have been a stranger in the same sense, given that his identity, if not already sus-
pected, could easily have been established in the relatively small community. His
appearance would have defined him in terms of probable social class and role to a
far greater extent than in today’s world. His behaviour would have had acceptable
explanations in terms of the shy suitor, the gauche admirer or even the romantic
stranger. The threatening and sinister were not imminent to anything like the same
degree in the attentions of a stranger.
John Updike (1997) described Kierkegaard’s behaviour as revealed in The
Seducer’s Diary as convoluted gallantry, although he does also describe it as stalk-
ing. Updike gave stalking a curious resonance, however, when he wrote: ‘The hero’s
long and loving stalking of a girl too young to approach provides, in fiction as in
reality, the peak of erotic excitement’ (ibid., p. xiii). Kierkegaard’s alter ego A does
not appear in The Seducer’s Diary to be desisting from direct contact because
Cordelia is a schoolgirl, so the reader is left in some doubt as to whose reality it is
that finds stalking young girls the peak of erotic excitement. That such people exist
will become clear as this book progresses; that Kierkegaard was an example is, one
can hope, a misinterpretation.
18 Stalkers and their victims

The social construction of stalking

In an outstanding article Lowney & Best (1995) examined the emergence of the
construction of stalking as a social problem. They examined media coverage
between 1980 and 1994 in the form of newspapers, tapes of television and radio
broadcasts and magazine articles, together with scholarly journals and court and
congressional proceedings. The focus was on how and in what form claims about
stalking were brought to public attention and how this led to the construction of a
new crime problem. They identify three phases, or periods, in the emergence of
stalking as a widely recognized social problem.
The first period described by Lowney & Best (1995) was from 1980 to 1988, when
there were articles and discussions under such headings as ‘psychological rape’ and
‘obsessive following’. The word ‘stalking’ hardly ever appeared. The psychological
rape and obsessive following that were made manifest in various forms of sexual
harassment and intrusiveness were typified by the nonviolent, but persistent,
pursuit of a victim (usually, but not exclusively, female). The victims, though dis-
tressed and exposed by the limitations of the criminal justice system’s ability to
protect them, were nevertheless often portrayed as at least partly complicit in their
plight. Although the behaviours were accepted as problematic they were not ‘pack-
aged and presented so as to command public attention’ (Lowney & Best, 1995, p.
39).
The second phase from 1989 to 1991 was, Lowney & Best (1995) argued, marked
by the increasing use of the term stalker, usually in the form of ‘star stalkers’. These
were men and women who persistently followed and harassed the famous. The
murder of the American sitcom actress Rebecca Schaeffer by a disordered fan,
Robert Bardo, gave a dramatic focus to this new construction. Victims were now
celebrities and the perpetrators typically mentally disturbed and/or inappropri-
ately obsessed with their victims. Stalking became a form of random violence for
which the victim bore no responsibility. The behaviour of the stalker was now seen
as the harbinger of violence and often as the product of mental disorder. The new
construction captured public attention, captured the attention and harnessed the
energies of the media and entertainment industries, and finally captured both the
attention and (self) interest of the law makers.
The final construction articulated by Lowney & Best (1995) was the redefinition,
in the period 1992–1994, of stalking as a product of failed relationships and male
violence. Stalking was reframed as a ‘women’s issue, a widespread precursor to
serious violence . . . a common problem . . . a form of domestic violence against
women . . .’ (ibid., p. 42–3). These authors illustrate how juxtaposing domestic vio-
lence and stalking could create new evidence. Thus a statement that 90% of women
killed by their partners had previously called the police was equated with 90%
19 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

having previously been stalked. This in turn generated the outrageous claim that
nine women a day (in the USA) are killed by stalkers. Stalking had been recon-
structed into a violent crime, usually committed against women by former or
current husbands or lovers and also labelled by some as an ‘epidemic’ (e.g. Gilligan,
1992). The new construction virtually excluded psychological explanations, let
alone psychiatric accounts, of the perpetrator’s motivations. Typifying examples of
stalking, when not an extension of the battering of women, feature children and
adolescents as victims. Such examples made clear the stalking paedophile’s respon-
sibilities and made manifest the essentially evil nature of the perpetrator’s inten-
tions and actions.
Stalking’s emergence as a social issue and a new category of crime shares features
with other similar categories that have come to prominence, including child sexual
abuse, mugging and road rage (Scott, 1995; Fergusson & Mullen, 1999). Each in
their different ways have acquired the status of social facts whose existence is no
longer challenged. The process of constructing a social problem, for example child
abuse, has been conceptualized as occurring in the four overlapping stages of dis-
covering, diffusion, consolidation and reification (Parton, 1979; Scott, 1995).
The key question about the ‘discovery’ of stalking is why these particular forms
of harassing behaviours were defined as a special problem at that particular histor-
ical moment, and why stalking suddenly gained such prominence. As has been
emphasized, there was nothing new about behaving in the manner we now call
stalking, nor in considering such behaviour to be a problem. What was new was
increasingly regarding such behaviour as a problem separable from other forms of
inappropriate intrusiveness and as having peculiarly sinister implications. The dis-
covery of stalking does not reflect a single influence but the concatenation of a
number of trends and concerns, many of which had remained inchoate before the
concept and the very word ‘stalking’ gave them a medium for expression.
The elements from which stalking’s initial articulation as the persistent follow-
ing and intrusion on the famous (star stalking) emerged include the following:
1 The 1970s and 1980s were marked by an increasing public concern about privacy
and the capacity of others to monitor and pry into the lives of fellow citizens.
These concerns were particularly acute for those in the public eye who were more
and more the object of the intrusions of gossip columnists, photographers (the
paparazzi), investigative journalists and the multiplicity of TV and radio shows
that claimed to expose or reveal the doings of the famous. For the famous, be
they entertainers, politicians, sports people or royalty, nothing was now sacred.
Every action, or rumour of action, was potentially grist for the exposure mill. In
response, privacy gained a reciprocally increased valuation, with the protection
of such privacy becoming a social good.
2 There has occurred over the last century or so a continuing change in how people
20 Stalkers and their victims

experience themselves in relation to other members of their society. The emer-

gence of large urban conurbations inevitably led to people living among those
about whom they had no knowledge. As early as 1798 a Parisian police agent was
complaining: ‘It is almost impossible to maintain good behaviour in a thickly
populated area where an individual is, so to speak, unknown to all others and
thus does not have to blush in front of anyone, (quoted in Benjamin, 1968,
p. 40). The stranger, in contrast to the foreigner, was of the same society but was
an unknown element within your own community. In literature the stranger
as potential threat and as the carrier of evil became an increasingly common
theme, illustrated in the work of, for example, Edgar Allen Poe, whose quote
from The Man of the Crowd prefaced this chapter.
At the very moment in the 1980s when the word ‘community’ was rising to
ideological prominence, the reality for most of those in Western society was a
dissolution and virtual disappearance of community. The bonds of common
interest, which linked individuals to those other individuals with whom they
lived in some proximity, were disappearing. In urban life neighbours were
increasingly becoming strangers. The individuals’ interests were rarely experi-
enced as linked to those among whom they lived. The latter became sources not
of mutual support but of irritation, intrusiveness and even risk. Fear became
even more likely to be a central mediator between the individual and the stranger.
In this climate the transformation of the stranger into predator was readily
accomplished. Again the famous shared in the emerging fear of fellow citizens.
The sense of vulnerability experienced by public figures was enhanced by such
events as the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of singer John
Lennon. There was apparently an escalation in the frequency with which the
famous received threatening letters and communications. Part of achieving
prominence became the acquisition of a need for protection. Whatever the real
level of threat to the famous, the perception of risk spawned a specialist security
industry with new technologies and new forms of expertise to assess risk,
manage risk and protect. It would be difficult not to become increasingly sensi-
tive to threat if surrounded by security experts who advise, and induce, the
spending of large sums of money on protection from as yet undeclared dangers.
3 The 1980s were marked by a perception that our society contained increasing
numbers of strange people who might intrude and threaten. Public awareness,
and wariness of, groups such as the mentally ill, the addicted and the intellectu-
ally disabled were fed partly by the reality of increased numbers of such people
in the community, but equally by constructions of such disorders and disabilities
as predisposing to impulsive and aggressive conduct. The Secret Service in the
USA maintain extensive dossiers on mentally disordered individuals who are
considered to present a risk, however remote, to the President or other politi-
21 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

cians. The threat to the famous is constructed as a threat from the irrational and
the disordered; after all, who but the mad could bear such animosity toward pol-
iticians, let alone entertainers?
These and other preoccupations found expression in the notion of stalking. The
murder of Rebecca Schaeffer provided the case around which concerns with
privacy, safety and the threat presented by the disordered crystallized in the form
of the new issue of stalking. Those claiming that stalking should be recognized as a
specific and serious crime were able to organize their advocacy around this dra-
matic example.
The phase of diffusion of the awareness of stalking through the wider society was
remarkably rapid. Given that stalking was initially viewed primarily as a threat to
which media personalities were peculiarly vulnerable, it is not surprising that
coverage was as extensive as it was effective. Equally, the combination of the
famous, sinister pursuit, violence and in many cases disordered affection proved
irresistible to the watching and reading public. Doubtless, experts expounding on
exotic and potentially titillating subjects such as erotomania and obsessional fol-
lowing added to the fascination.
The ready acceptance of stalking as a social problem was accompanied by a dra-
matic widening of the concept. What began as a description of behaviour directed
at the famous was rapidly generalized to include similar behaviours directed at
ordinary individuals. A social problem that was relatively uncommon, because it
was circumscribed by the contingency of being a star, was transformed into an
experience open to all. Nobody was safe, or at least in the early stages of the genesis
of stalking as a social problem, no woman or child was safe.
These developments in part mirror the acceptance of child sexual abuse as a
major social problem. Child sexual abuse emerged in the late 1970s in the form of
claims for society’s attention and concern made by adult women usually recalling
their victimization as children by incestuous abuse. This soon generalized to incor-
porate claims about a wide range of child molestation affecting a significant pro-
portion of the population (Fergusson & Mullen, 1999).
The first and most important phase in the generalizing of stalking occurred when
well-established concerns about the harassment of women by their male partners
were annexed to the emergent phenomenon of stalking. The bracketing of stalking
with domestic violence was dramatically successful for those who had been advo-
cating more recognition and greater protection for battered women. The media fas-
cination with stalking, together with the public and political acceptance of it as a
serious form of criminal activity, was readily transferred to stalking as a form of
domestic violence. For a period the construction of stalking was almost completely
colonized by legitimate, but previously discounted, attempts to extend legal protec-
tions to women harassed and pursued by current or previous partners. The first
22 Stalkers and their victims

anti-stalking legislation in California reflected concerns with the stalking of the

famous, although subsequent legislation increasingly gave primacy to the protec-
tion of women, some anti-stalking statutes even confining stalking to the harass-
ment of those who had previously either cohabited or had had intimate
relationships with their stalker (e.g. original legislation in West Virginia in the USA
and New South Wales in Australia). Stalking made one of its earliest entries into the
scholarly behavioural science literature firmly coupled with domestic violence
(Kurt, 1995). The first community study to be published of the prevalence of stalk-
ing surveyed only women (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996). The USA
Department of Justice, which has played an important role in documenting stalk-
ing and supporting legislative responses in the USA, produced its reports under the
title ‘Domestic Violence and Stalking’ and reported to Congress under the Violence
Against Women Act. Despite this, to its credit, the research commissioned by the
US Department of Justice surveyed males as well as females. This research has been
important in widening notions of who stalks and who is stalked. (National Institute
of Justice, 1997; Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998).
To understand how it was possible for stalking to be so successfully translated
into an aspect of domestic violence it is necessary to examine developments over
the prior decade. The intimidation and battering of women by their male partners
attained substantial prominence as a social problem in the 1970s and 1980s. The
success of advocates for abused women in evoking appropriate social and legisla-
tive responses was, however, limited with regard to harassment that did not involve
overt physical violence (Follingstad et al., 1990; Walker, 1989). The media gave con-
siderable attention in the early 1980s to the following and harassing of women after
the revelation that actress Jodie Foster had been persistently pursued in the USA by
John Hinckley Jr, who later attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.
Although the media at this time tended to focus on the famous it did generalize into
the broader issue of the harassing of women by their male partners (Wilcox, 1982).
Female harassment was the term usually employed for this phenomenon, though
‘psychological rape’ briefly had currency in the media (Jason et al., 1984; Lowney
& Best, 1995). An interesting study by Jason and colleagues, which appeared in
1984, examined female harassment. They defined female harassment as ‘a male per-
sistently using psychological or physical abuse in an attempt to begin or continue a
dating relationship with a female who had indicated a desire to terminate the dating
relationship’ (Jason et al., 1984, p. 261). Their study amounts to arguably the first
study of this form of stalking in a community sample. Female harassment did not
continue to receive sufficient media coverage to establish its position on either the
public or political agendas. Further systematic studies also had to wait for the stim-
ulus provided by the emergence of the stalking phenomena in 1989 and 1990.
Although female harassment failed in the wider public arena to hold attention, it
23 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

remained firmly on the agenda of activists and advocates. The women’s movement
was only too aware of its frequency and its destructive potential. When stalking
exploded onto the media as a hot issue, female harassment was a ready-made claim-
ant for a share of the attention, a claim pushed home with considerable success by
the domestic violence lobby.
As part of this phase of diffusion the emphasis on the stalker being mentally dis-
ordered or at the very least an obsessional follower was replaced by a characteriza-
tion of a male who brutalized and potentially battered his female partner. Mental
disorder was replaced by brutality and criminality, and the stalker became more
strongly gendered.
Stalking conceptually and legislatively has not remained so closely tied to domes-
tic violence. It is not clear exactly which influences led to a further generalization
of stalking and a partial return to a concern with pursuit by disordered admirers.
Certainly, when studies of stalkers began to appear they suggested a wider range of
victims and perpetrators than could be accommodated within either the domestic
violence paradigm or the notion of stalkers to the stars. Initial studies of victims
also indicated a wide range of relationships between stalker and victim (see Chapter
3). The media continued to give prominence to accounts of the stalking of men as
well as women and one of the outstanding journalistic accounts during this period
was of the stalking of a male surgeon by a female journalist (Brenner, 1991).
Perhaps what was most important in driving the increasingly broad conceptualiza-
tion of the relationship between stalkers and their victims was the practical experi-
ence of both courts and researchers. Beginning with the behaviour of persistent
intrusions and unwanted communications rather than with causal theories (be that
around domestic violence or obsessional following), then a far richer reality is
revealed in the phenomena of stalking. Courts have perforce to consider first and
foremost behaviour, not theories of causation. Behavioural scientists should start
with the behavioural phenomena, not their pet theory about those phenomena. As
this book will illustrate, we hope, if you begin with the behaviours that constitute
stalking you reveal a varied and rich tapestry of intentions, motivations and forms
of relatedness that frustrates attempts to restrict stalking and stalkers to any single
context or overarching theory of causation.
The phase of consolidation of a new social problem occurs when a social agency
or agencies come to be held responsible for responding to the perceived needs
created by this new social and political agenda. Stalking once given life by the media
was rapidly transformed into a specific type of criminal offence. It was to the police
and the courts that the responsibility of dealing with stalkers fell. Stalkers were init-
ially regarded as drawn from the disturbed and the mentally disordered of the
community. Despite the powerful impact of the subsequent absorption of forms of
domestic violence into stalking the notion that stalkers were at least in part a mental
24 Stalkers and their victims

health problem persisted. The first organizational structure to emerge specifically

to manage stalkers was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management
Unit (Zona et al., 1993, 1998). This combined the skills of police, legal and mental
health professionals in a system aimed to manage, and where possible prevent,
stalking. They employed a range of interventions including those of mental health
professionals. In our own mental health clinic in Melbourne the first initiative was
directed at providing support to victims of stalking but this soon led to a parallel
concern with the assessment and management of perpetrators of stalking. This
book is predicated on the assumption that the approaches and skills of mental
health professionals and behavioural scientists are central to understanding and
managing stalking.
The final stage of the reification of a social problem involves the ossifying of the
issue into something taken for granted as a natural area of concern by the general
community (Scott, 1995). The questions become not ‘What is stalking?’, ‘What
brings it about?’ or even ‘How much of it is out there?’, but merely ‘Who should
deal with it?’ and ‘Why haven’t they dealt with it?’. The issue becomes one for pro-
fessional competencies and institutional technologies. The problem itself becomes
an accepted part of the social landscape, which may raise concerns but not curios-
ity. If stalking has reached that stage by the time this book has been published then
only a select few of our professional colleagues are likely to be reading this sentence.
There are problems over the use of theories of social construction. In attempt-
ing to describe the way in which a phenomenon becomes an object of knowledge
and a topic of concern within a particular culture, it is all too easy to appear to be
overly sceptical or even mocking. Persistently inflicting on someone else repeated
unwanted intrusions and communications is a totally unacceptable way of behav-
ing, which, in our view, has rightly been made criminal in most Western jurisdic-
tions. Such behaviour induces fear and can produce in the victim considerable
psychological damage and extensively disrupt their functioning. It is a real social
evil. It was a social evil before the word and the concept of stalking emerged in 1989
and 1990. Stalking is nevertheless a construction. Neither the reality of the pain and
distress that so often accompanies both being stalked and being a stalker, nor the
fact that stalking is a construction, should be in question (for an exemplary discus-
sion of these issues with regard to multiple personality disorder, see Hacking,
1995).

Conclusions

The social construction of stalking began around instances that typically involved
extensive and prolonged intrusions and culminated not infrequently in assaults
that could be lethal. The incorporation of female harassment into the rubric of
25 Stalking – a new categorization of human behaviour

stalking widened the net but maintained a clear association with assault, battery
and even murder. Stalking has now been greatly extended to encompass behaviours
that, although distressing, are typically far less likely to involve either such exten-
sive intrusions or such obvious risks of serious assault as did the earlier typifying
cases. This extension has not to date been accompanied by an equivalent
modification in the meanings and expectations attached to being stalked. As a
result, a radical restructuring of our understanding of the social world may be
occurring.
A similar trajectory was followed when child sexual abuse, initially constructed
around severely physically intrusive and often prolonged incestuous abuse, was
broadened to incorporate a wide range of forms of the sexual molestation of chil-
dren. The benefits of this process were the recognition of the true extent of the
sexual exploitation of children and the emergence of a social consensus that such
behaviour should be stopped and victims accorded appropriate protection (and in
some societies treatment and monetary recompense). The downside was a wide-
spread confusion about the nature, extent and effects of child sexual abuse in all its
forms, which impaired effective responses (Fergusson & Mullen, 1999). It also
brought about a change in how victims understood themselves and their pasts,
which was certainly not without its problems. The attempt more accurately to
inform professionals and the public about the realities of stalkers and stalking is
central to this book. We are at a relatively early stage in the development of stalk-
ing as a social issue and an area of scientific study but already the need to confront
growing myths and unexamined assumptions about stalkers and stalking is clear.