Stalking the stalker: a profile of offenders

FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,The, Dec, 2002 by Robert A. Wood, Nona L. Wood

"Stalkers are like naughty third graders. They don't care what kind of attention they get, as long as it's attention." (1) Individuals unfamiliar with the phenomenon of stalkers and stalking often are surprised that stalkers may value negative attention just as much as they do positive attention. Why would anyone want to have a relationship with another person who does not want to be involved? The answer to this question can help law enforcement personnel understand stalking situations more clearly and aid them in facing the growing challenge of detecting and investigating such incidents.

Statistics

Stereotypically linked by much of the general public with the "rich and famous," until very recently, most information concerning stalking came from media accounts of incidents, individual case studies, or academic endeavors that focused on one narrow facet of the problem. In the early 1 990s, the most often quoted figures showed that 5 percent of women in the United States were stalked at some point during their lifetimes and about 200,000 were victims each year. However, estimates based on the first national study on stalking presented in 1998 found that rates were substantially higher. (2) This survey of 8,000 women and 8,000 men concluded that, nationwide, 8.1 percent of women have been stalked at some time during their lives and 1,006,970 are stalked annually. These figures are 1.6 times and 5 times, respectively, higher than those expressed during the early 1990s. In addition, this study revealed that 2.2 percent of men had experienced stalking during their lifetimes and that 370,990 become victims each year.

The first national study also shed some light on how common stalking is compared with other types of violence in the United States. In a 1-year period, the study estimated that women were two times as likely to be physically assaulted than stalked, but three times more likely to be stalked than sexually assaulted. Thus, in terms of frequency, stalking falls in between the other two crimes, (3) although stalking situations may include one or both of these behaviors. Overall, however, despite the increasing importance of stalking, it remains a comparatively unexamined source of criminal behavior. Therefore, the law enforcement community may gain some insight into stalking by reviewing the growing literature on the topic, with special emphasis on profiling characteristics of stalkers and the various typologies and psychological motivations of such offenders.

Definition

Many different definitions of stalking exist in the literature with most defining the practice as including a pattern of harassing or menacing behaviors linked with a threat. (4) The first national study defined stalking as "... a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated visual or physical proximity; nonconsensual communication; verbal, written, or implied threats; or a combination thereof that would cause fear in a reasonable person (with repeated meaning on two or more occasions)." (5)

Every state in America, as well as the District of Columbia, have passed antistalking legislation, (6) whereas Canada commonly refers to stalking as "criminal harassment." (7) Because antistalking laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, law enforcement officers should familiarize themselves with the elements of the law in their specific jurisdictions. (8)

In addition, federal laws, such as the 1994 Violence Against Women Act and the Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act of 1996, may affect stalking cases. In some instances, stalking behaviors may violate federal law when offenders cross state lines to stalk a person or when they enter or leave federal property or Indian country for the purpose of stalking someone. These relatively new pieces of legislation provide powerful tools to address these criminal behaviors.

Behaviors

For many reasons, stalking behaviors are quite diverse. Stalkers may ambush their targets, phone repeatedly, pursue or follow their targets, make obscene or threatening phone calls, display weapons, trespass, or vandalize property. (9) They may send numerous letters, deliver unwanted gifts, or restrain or confine the objects of their obsessions. As a means of controlling the behavior of their targets, stalkers may threaten to commit suicide or harm the victims, the victims' families, or even the victims' pets. Perpetrators may attempt to limit the amount of contact targets have with their families and friends and may insist on knowing the whereabouts of targets and what they are doing at all times. What they all have in common, however, is a persistent pattern of unwanted behaviors that interfere with other persons' abilities to control their own lives.

A relatively new form of stalking, cyberstalking, uses computers to stalk individuals and may take the form of electronic mail, faxes, or harassment in Internet chat rooms. For example, in one recent incident, a woman in San Francisco received about 1,500 pages of e-mails and faxes over a 2-month period that threatened her life and those of her children. Governmental authorities find it difficult to estimate how many individuals are victims of cyber-stalking, although they also note that the number of complaints concerning this type of unwanted contact have increased in recent years. In addition, such cases prove hard to prosecute successfully. (10)