Tales of the relentless pursuit of a romantic interest date back to antiquity, turning up in the Epic ofGilgamesh. More than 4,000 years from the time that poem emerged, society still runs into enormous difficulties in understanding and dealing with someone who engages in such obsessive and unwanted pursuits. Laws on stalking are still in their infancy. The first U.S. law criminalizing stalking passed in 1990, and within two decades similar laws arose worldwide. The growing realization of the harm stalking causes also ignited an explosion of multidisciplinary scientific research aimed at defining it, understanding its pathology and developing prevention strategies.
Defining stalking has proved to be a challenge. As research psychologist Timothy Valshtein of Yeshiva University and his colleagues explained in a recent paper in Psychological Assessment,there exists “gray areas” where accepted courtship practices and stalking overlap. “This notion of bullheaded romantic persistence is a recurring cultural touchstone—countless movies, music and books celebrate the heroics of steadfast pursuit with admiration,” Valsthein says.
What targeted people label “stalking” may be viewed sympathetically by others. In a 2020 study of men cyberstalking women, Andréa Becker, a sociologist now at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues, found evidence that in our culture, “stalking is normalized, minimized, and romanticized.” Documented common myths about stalking include beliefs that it’s flattering and not harmful. Part of the confusion has to do with a troubling paradox. The same acts that may be acceptable or even welcome to a person within a relationship—sending them multiple gifts, calling their family members without permission—can be seen as inappropriate or even criminal when the pursuer is no longer in a relationship with that person or never was.
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Women and men define stalking differently, as do targets and perpetrators. One 2005 study showed that barely 30 percent of students who read accounts from a case where a perpetrator was actually convicted of cyberstalking identified the behavior as such. In another experiment, women who were presented with one of four vignettes in which a man cyberstalked a woman were more prone to name the situation “stalking” than male participants. In general, people are likely to label such pursuit from a stranger as stalking but are less likely to do so for the same behavior when it is exhibited by an acquaintance or ex-boyfriend. In their 2020 study, Becker and her co-authors called this a “culturally accepted hierarchy of stalking narratives.”
Researchers agree that most stalkers, as many as 60 percent by some estimates, are ex-lovers. Former partners can become a danger for several reasons. University of Kentucky applied research psychologist TK Logan notes that stalking often co-occurs with sexual assault and harassment. Moreover exes who become stalkers know their targets’ triggers, habits and haunts. In addition, says Edge Hill University criminologist Nicholas Longpré, “you don’t believe that this person is dangerous because you love that person. So you might accept more risks, more behaviors until you really act.”
Assault and death are the most feared outcomes. Less well known, Logan says, are the long-term psychological, social and economic harms. In an effort to escape their stalker, targets may feel they need to move from their home or leave their job, she says. But even after the stalking stops, a targeted person can lose the feeling of being safe—ever. “‘All of the things,’ one victim put it, ‘going for a walk, answering the phone, watching a movie, all things that are ordinary are no longer. Now they are risky when you are being stalked,’” Logan adds.
Stalkers and their targets can be any gender, but associated violence is overwhelmingly committed by men who stalk women. Typically, women feel more fear. But women can stalk as well. Female stalkers who target a man, Logan asserts, can wreak tremendous damage to him: to his reputation, his livelihood, his family.
So what should you do if you’re being stalked? The advice targeted people typically receive tends to be both useless and costly, experts say. Targets are urged to avoid the person stalking them at all costs: shut down all social media, avoid places known by the stalker, change jobs or even homes. But a step as small as deleting your LinkedIn account, Becker says, could lose you job prospects while having zero effect on your stalker.
A 2021 study of how women who are stalked by men try to end the behavior was “disheartening,” says its co-author Christina Dardis, a research psychologist at Towson University. Some female targets she and her colleagues surveyed said they’d confronted the stalker, reasoned with him or firmly told him to stop. Others changed their life as much as possible to avoid the predator. Questioning these targeted women eight weeks later, Dardis found that no one strategy stood out as effective.
Some psychologists believe that identifying the personality profiles of potential stalkers may be useful. Valshtein and his colleagues have developed a scale to measure what they call “presumptuous romantic intentions.” In their recent Psychological Assessment paper, the researchers asked test takers whether they would engage in certain behaviors—going through a person’s private things, touching a person in an intimate way—regardless of whether their interest was reciprocated. Across five studies, they found that this scale predicted behavior. For men, such intentions were linked to greater narcissism, entitlement and impulsivity.
A similar effort documented links between stalking and level of personality pathology. Using data from a sample of about 1,500 adults aged 18 to 30, Dominick Gamache, a research psychologist at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, and his colleagues found that for women, the most predictive trait was “Deceitfulness,” in which others are used as a means to an end, similar to the trait of Machiavellianism. Female stalkers, Gamache explains, pursue their own needs to have a relationship regardless of the wishes of the other person. Impulsivity, which can lead to violence, predicted stalking in both women and men in the study. For men, however, the most predictive trait was what Gamache and his colleagues called “Unusual Beliefs and Experiences.” Men may believe, for example, that persistent pursuit and bold gestures are romantic despite clear signals the victim wants nothing to do with them. If therapists are alert to these risk profiles, Gamache suggests, they may help avert the initiation of stalking behaviors in patients coping with a breakup or unrequited love.
While stalking laws vary across jurisdictions, Logan says, they generally share some basic elements. “A simple definition of stalking is a course of conduct, which is typically legally two or more related acts that creates a threat and fear or concern for safety in the target and is unwanted,” she adds.
It’s hard to nail down stalking conviction numbers in the U.S. because of different state laws, Longpré says, but in England and Wales, there are about 15,000 a year. That is a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 million annual occurrences there. Only one in 50 cases is reported, one in 435 is charged, one in 556 is prosecuted, and one in 1,000 is convicted.
With the recent proliferation of stalking laws have come convicted offenders and the need for new treatments to prevent them from reoffending. Gamache says that some psychologists have adapted therapies that were originally designed for personality disorders. For example, Fordham University psychologist Barry Rosenfeld, an early pioneer in stalker treatment, and his colleagues adapted dialectical behavior therapy, which targets emotional control and has been used for difficult-to-treat conditions such as borderline personality disorder. Given that impulsivity is a major risk for stalking, teaching patients to control their emotions could be effective, Gamache says.
As programs emerge, scientists are asking, Do they work? Answers are still preliminary. One British intervention offers promise. As described in a 2022 study in Psychology, Crime & Law that assessed the intervention, after “bespoke” treatments in which therapies were customized for particular personality issues, six offenders said they had improved their ability to reflect on their behavior, solve problems and make decisions. They said they’d learned to understand the seriousness of their behavior, its impact on their own lives and its costs to their victims. They also remarked that they’d learned strategies for controlling their feelings.
Because stalkers are so different from one another, evaluation and treatment are complex, says Kritika Jerath, a co-author of the Psychology, Crime & Law study and a criminologist now at the at the University of Nottingham in England. Some of her colleagues, she says, classify offenders in five sometimes overlapping categories: the ex-partner, the revenger of perceived wrongs, the rejected suitor, the lonely incompetent suitor and the sexual predator.
While some offenders have serious mental health problems, others are shocked to discover their behavior is classified as stalking. Some scientists suggest that educating the mostly clueless might reduce stalking. In a recent series of experiments, Kennesaw State University psychologist Corinne McNamara and her colleagues surveyed undergraduates about which stalking behaviors those participants had engaged in—such as going through someone’s personal stuff or quizzing a person’s friends about their activities. Then the participants were randomly assigned to a group in which they were told that a stated percentage of their peers behaved this way: for one group, this figure was 40 percent inflated, and for the other, it was 40 percent deflated. Afterward, when asked about their future intentions, admitted perpetrators who’d seen the inflated norms said they were more likely to engage in this behavior in the future. “It’s almost like they were looking for validation of what they were already doing,” McNamara says. In the deflated group, those who had not engaged in stalking were more influenced by the presented norms and were less likely to say they would do it in the future.
While education about social norms is unlikely to discourage stalkers with a serious pathology, McNamara believes it could have a positive effect, especially on young people who, she says, “are unwittingly engaging in stalking. They’re flirting, they think that they’re courting, and then, all of a sudden, that behavior becomes inappropriate and unwanted.”
Broad programs of education are needed, experts say, for everyone from college students to policymakers to police officers to teach them what constitutes stalking, how harmful it can be and which stalkers are the greatest threat. For example, Longpré says, law enforcement needs to focus its resources on the more common and dangerous ex-partner stalker, who is often not taken seriously, compared with the rarer stranger stalker. In the broader culture, Gamache says, common myths about stalking need to be addressed. “The idea that jealousy is a sign of a grand romantic gesture..., this must be challenged wherever and whenever we can as clinicians, as researchers, as journalists,” he says.