The Facts You Didn't Know About Stalking ~ PostPrime

Stalking facts at a Glance:

1. A common technique of stalkers is to kidnap, injure, or kill the victim’s pet, knowing that this will often devastate the victim emotionally.
2. Victims of stalking often say it would be better to be murdered than have to go through the horrendous mental anguish of being stalked.
3. Slashing the victim’s tires or vandalism/destruction of the victim’s home and property is standard behavior for stalkers.
4. Friends and family who support the victim are themselves in danger. The stalker views these people as obstacles to what he wants and will turn his wrath on them as well. Cases exist where relatives or a new boyfriend of the victim have had their home burned to the ground.
5. For someone being stalked, everyday things such as answering the phone or going out for a ride alone can no longer be done without constant fear.
6. Stalkers have been known to hire private detectives to help track down the victim when they’ve moved to another state.
7. Victims often are subjected to being followed, continual drive-bys of their homes and workplaces, and being inundated with unwanted phone calls, answering machine messages, letters, emails, notes left on doors and car windshields, and so forth. It is, for all intents and purposes, an act of terrorism.

8. Having police confront the stalker or getting a restraining order often will provoke or escalate the violence in the case.
9. While police in general do everything they can within the law, some stalking victims complain that their cries for help are looked upon as exaggerations, overreactions, or even lies.
10. The first stalking law was instituted in 1990 in California,and since then, all fifty states have enacted stalking laws
11. Even after the stalker has been successfully arrested, prosecuted, and jailed, the victim still lives in fear of the day the stalker will be released.
12. Forensic psychologists divide stalkers into two general categories. About 25 percent of stalkers fall into the “love obsession” group. People who stalk celebrities fall into this category. They are also the people who become fixated with a coworker, acquaintance, teacher, and so forth. They live in a delusional fantasy world complete with their own script of how this object of their fixation loves them and is already in a relationship with them. Those in this category suffer from a form of mental illness, like paranoia or schizophrenia. The other 75 percent or so of stalkers are in the “simple obsession”group. These people previously have been in some form of relationship with the victim, either romantic or personal. When the relationship ends, the stalker feels lost and powerless. He cannot bear the thought of the victim being out of his life, so the patterns of stalking behavior begin. Unfortunately, this category produces the majority of domestic violence, the worst of which ends in murder-suicide.

Cyberstalking Facts at a Glance :

1. “Cyberstalking” is the term used to describe repeated threatening or harassing electronic communications (emails) sent through the Internet. What begins as an innocent correspondence with a stranger in a chat room can develop into an obsessional pursuit by the online stalker, who can be every bit as devious as his offline counterpart. They will wait for the victim to go online and then send constant instant messages (IMs), or the victim will find their inbox full of emails from this one person when they go online. Because of the anonymous nature of the Internet, the cyberstalker can be down the street or on the other side of the country.
2. During his tenure as vice president, Al Gore said of cyberstalking, “Make no mistake, this kind of harassment can be as frightening and as real as being followed in your neighborhood or watched in your home."
3. If the cyberstalker has the victim’s personal information (which was willingly given to the would-be stalker when they thought the stalker was just a “nice guy”), the stalker can go to chat rooms impersonating the victim and post enticing or inflammatory messages on the bulletin board (sometimes giving out the street address and phone number of the victim at the same time), which can bring third parties into the harassment.
4. One cyberstalking victim in California kept receiving the number 187 on her pager. 187 is the police code for a homicide.

Questions and Answers:

Q : Which gender more commonly stalks the other?

A : Men. Eight percent of men are stalkers while only onequarter of that (two percent) are women. All told, experts estimate that there are 1.4 million stalkers in America.

Q : How many women and how many men will be stalked in their lifetime?
A : Eight percent of American women and 2 percent of American men—1.4 million stalking victims every year. Most stalkers have been in relationships with the people they stalk, but many have never even met the victims or were just casual acquaintances.
Q : If someone is being stalked, is it wise to get a restraining order, which will theoretically keep the stalker a certain distance away?
A : If you are being stalked, consult an expert to see if it will work in your case. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Q : How many stalkers are violent?
A : Thirty percent, almost one third—a scary figure.