Stalking
Based on Wikipedia: Stalking
The Crime That Hides in Plain Sight
Here's a disturbing paradox: almost every behavior that constitutes stalking is perfectly legal on its own. Sending a text message? Legal. Buying someone flowers? Legal. Walking down a public street? Legal. Calling someone's phone? Legal.
Yet string these innocent acts together, direct them repeatedly at someone who doesn't want your attention, and you've committed a crime that affects millions of people every year—one that can escalate to assault, rape, or murder.
This is the fundamental challenge of stalking. Unlike robbery or arson, there's no single definable act. Instead, it's a pattern, a constellation of behaviors that individually mean nothing but collectively can destroy a person's sense of safety, autonomy, and sanity.
What Stalking Actually Is
The word "stalking" originally had nothing to do with harassment. For centuries, starting around the 1500s, a "stalker" was simply a prowler or poacher—someone who crept through woods hunting game. The term didn't jump to human targets until the late twentieth century, when tabloid newspapers began using it to describe obsessed fans who pursued celebrities.
The shift in meaning is telling. We borrowed a word from hunting because that's what stalking feels like to victims: being prey.
The clinical definition is deceptively simple. Stalking is unwanted, repeated surveillance or contact by one person toward another. The key words are "unwanted" and "repeated." One unwanted phone call isn't stalking. Ten unwanted phone calls might be. The United Kingdom's legal standard draws the line at just two incidents—if the person should reasonably know their behavior is unwelcome, doing it twice crosses into illegality.
But here's where it gets complicated. The same behaviors that constitute stalking can also be part of normal courtship. Calling someone you're interested in. Showing up where they might be. Sending gifts. These actions exist on a spectrum from romantic persistence to criminal harassment, and the dividing line often depends entirely on context and the recipient's feelings.
A 2002 report from the United States National Center for Victims of Crime captured this breadth: "virtually any unwanted contact between two people that directly or indirectly communicates a threat or places the victim in fear can be considered stalking."
That's an extraordinarily wide net.
The Problem With Defining It
Some philosophers have argued that the moral wrong of stalking isn't well defined at all. One proposed framework suggests that stalking is essentially an attempt to force a personal connection on someone—to create a relationship through sheer will when no genuine relationship exists or when one person wants it to end.
This framing helps explain why stalking feels so violating. It's not just harassment. It's someone unilaterally deciding that a relationship exists between you and acting on that belief despite your explicit rejection. They're treating your "no" as merely an obstacle to overcome rather than a boundary to respect.
Before researchers even had a word for this pattern, they called it "female harassment," "obsessive following," or, most disturbingly, "psychological rape." That last term, coined in the psychological literature, captures something important: stalking is a violation of mental and emotional space in the same way sexual assault violates physical space.
A 1995 academic paper titled "Stalking Strangers and Lovers" was one of the first to use the term "stalking" in its modern sense, specifically to describe men who aggressively pursued former partners after breakups. This wasn't about strangers obsessing over celebrities. This was about ordinary relationships ending and one party refusing to accept it.
Who Stalks Whom
The popular image of a stalker—the deranged stranger fixated on a celebrity—is statistically rare. Most stalking is far more mundane and far more dangerous.
Intimate-partner stalkers, people who stalk current or former romantic partners, are the most common and the most deadly. In the United Kingdom, most stalkers are former partners. A Home Office study found that the Protection from Harassment Act was primarily used to address domestic disputes and neighbor conflicts, not the celebrity-stalker scenarios that dominate media coverage.
The numbers are stark. According to a 2009 United States Department of Justice report, about two percent of women experienced stalking in that year, compared to about 0.7 percent of men. Studies consistently show that 80 to 90 percent of stalking perpetrators are male.
But the gender dynamics are more nuanced than a simple "men stalk women" narrative suggests. Male victims report being stalked by male and female offenders at roughly equal rates—43 percent of male victims identified a female stalker, while 41 percent identified a male one. Female victims, however, are overwhelmingly stalked by men, with 67 percent reporting male stalkers versus 24 percent reporting female ones.
Women who stalk tend to target other women. Men who stalk primarily target women.
The Psychology Behind It
Researchers have identified several distinct types of stalkers, each driven by different motivations.
Rejected stalkers pursue victims to reverse, correct, or avenge a rejection. Their former partner left them, and they refuse to accept it. Or they were fired, dumped, or cut off from a friendship, and they want to make the person pay or take them back.
Resentful stalkers operate from a sense of grievance. They believe they've been wronged and launch a vendetta designed primarily to frighten and distress. The goal isn't reconciliation—it's punishment.
Intimacy seekers want to establish a loving relationship that doesn't exist. At one extreme are people with erotomania, a delusional disorder where someone believes another person is secretly in love with them despite all evidence to the contrary. At the less extreme end are people who acknowledge their feelings aren't reciprocated but pursue their target anyway with what researchers call "delusional intensity," convinced they'll eventually succeed.
Incompetent suitors lack social skills but feel entitled to romantic attention. They've become fixated on someone who caught their interest and simply won't take no for an answer, often because they don't understand social cues well enough to recognize rejection.
Only about ten percent of stalkers have erotomania or other psychotic disorders like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The vast majority are not psychotic. They may have depression, substance abuse problems, or personality disorders—particularly antisocial, borderline, or narcissistic traits—but they're not disconnected from reality. They know what they're doing.
Their pursuit tends to be angry, vindictive, and obsessive. They project blame onto their victims, deny the severity of their actions, and minimize the impact. They're jealous, dependent, and absolutely certain that the other person is somehow at fault.
Why Do They Do It?
Several theories attempt to explain stalking behavior, and none of them is entirely satisfying on its own.
The attachment theory perspective suggests that stalkers have insecure attachment styles, often developed in childhood, which contribute to borderline and narcissistic personality traits. These individuals need external validation to maintain their sense of self-worth. When someone rejects them, their entire self-concept is threatened, and stalking becomes a maladaptive way of trying to restore that validation or punish the person who withdrew it.
Social learning theory proposes that stalking is learned behavior. People who stalk are more likely to know others who stalk or who approve of such behavior. This parallels research on criminal behavior generally—antisocial peers and attitudes are strong predictors of criminal offending. A study of American college students found that social learning factors were indeed associated with self-reported stalking perpetration.
Then there's the behavioral reinforcement explanation. Stalking behaviors repeat and escalate when they're rewarded. The reward might be external—the victim responds, giving the stalker the attention they crave—or internal, like feelings of power and control. For someone who feels powerless in their life, the knowledge that they can make another person afraid might be deeply satisfying.
Perhaps most troubling is the coercive control theory, which suggests that stalking is simply an extension of abusive relationship dynamics. If someone was controlling and intimidating during a relationship, stalking after the relationship ends is just a continuation of that pattern. The relationship may be over, but the abuser's belief that they own their partner persists.
The Normalization Problem
Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people have engaged in stalking-like behaviors at some point, particularly after breakups.
Researchers have noted that the majority of men and women admit to some form of unwanted pursuit after a relationship ends. Checking an ex's social media obsessively. Driving by their house. Texting when the other person has asked for space. Most people stop these behaviors over time as they process the end of the relationship and move on.
This has led some scholars to suggest that "engagement in low levels of unwanted pursuit behaviors for a relatively short amount of time, particularly in the context of a relationship break-up, may be normative for heterosexual dating relationships occurring within U.S. culture."
In other words, a little bit of stalking is culturally normal.
This creates a massive problem for identifying when behavior crosses the line. If everyone does it a little, how do we recognize when someone is doing it too much? How do victims know whether they're overreacting or genuinely in danger?
Media doesn't help. Popular culture is saturated with narratives where a man's persistent romantic pursuit eventually wins over a reluctant woman. The message is clear: her "no" really means "try harder." These stories teach men that stalking-adjacent behavior is not only acceptable but romantic, while teaching women to question whether their discomfort is valid.
Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, writing in the journal Sex Roles, argues that gender socialization fundamentally shapes how both stalkers and victims perceive these behaviors. Men may view their actions as normal courtship because media and culture have told them it is. Women may doubt their own reactions because they've been taught that persistent male attention is flattering, not threatening.
The Damage It Does
Over 91 percent of stalking victims experience psychological impact.
A 2023 review of the research found that the most common effects include fear of death, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts and memories. Less common but still significant are panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression. Perhaps most alarming: 24 percent of stalking victims have considered or attempted suicide.
The scholar Lamber Royakkers described stalking as "a form of mental assault, in which the perpetrator repeatedly, unwantedly, and disruptively breaks into the life-world of the victim." The key insight is that the individual acts that make up stalking often seem minor—a phone call, a gift, an appearance at a public place—but their cumulative effect is devastating.
The disruption extends beyond psychology into every practical aspect of life. To escape a stalker, victims frequently change their phone numbers, their jobs, and their homes. They may cut ties with friends and family to prevent the stalker from using them to gain access. They may restrict their movements, avoid public places, and constantly look over their shoulder.
Research shows that 97.4 percent of stalking victims take coping measures. Most start with minor changes—new phone numbers, adjusted routines, increased security. More drastic measures like moving house typically only happen in the most severe cases. But the cumulative toll of constant vigilance, constant disruption, constant fear, isolates victims from their normal lives and support networks.
Some researchers have described stalking as a close relationship, albeit a twisted one. In a healthy relationship, both parties share cooperative goals. In a stalking dynamic, the goals are opposed—typically, a woman trying to end all contact with a man determined to escalate it. But the duration, frequency, and intensity of interaction can rival that of an actual romantic partnership. The stalker may spend more time thinking about their victim than a boyfriend or girlfriend would think about a partner.
Who Gets Stalked
Australian researchers Mullen and Pathé, working with stalking victims for eight years, identified several categories based on the victim's prior relationship with their stalker.
Prior intimates form the largest category: victims who shared a previous romantic relationship with their stalker. The typical profile is a woman stalked by a male former partner. These victims face the highest risk of violence, especially if the stalker has a criminal history. Interestingly, victims of "date stalkers"—people who had brief relationships rather than long-term partnerships—are less likely to experience violence.
Casual acquaintances and friends make up another significant group. Male stalking victims most often fall into this category, as do victims of neighbor stalking. When your stalker lives next door, changing your address becomes not just an option but a necessity.
Professional contacts include healthcare providers stalked by patients, teachers stalked by students, and lawyers stalked by clients. Certain professions carry higher stalking risk simply because they involve ongoing relationships with people who may be unstable, desperate, or developing unhealthy fixations.
Workplace contacts bring the danger directly into professional environments. When a stalker shows up at someone's workplace—whether as an employer, coworker, or customer—they threaten not just the victim but everyone around them.
Strangers are victims who often have no idea how or why they were targeted. Typically, these stalkers developed an admiration from afar, based on nothing more than seeing the victim in public.
The famous represent the category most people think of when they hear "stalking," but they're actually the least common. Politicians, celebrities, and athletes do get stalked, but they're the exception, not the rule.
The Double Bind of Reporting
Gender creates complications at every stage of the stalking dynamic, from commission to reporting to prosecution.
Men are less likely to report being stalked, partly because gender roles tell them they should be able to handle it themselves. Admitting you're afraid of someone—especially a woman—conflicts with masculine identity. So male victims suffer in silence.
Women face different barriers. They may doubt whether their experiences "count" as stalking, having internalized cultural messages that male persistence is romantic rather than threatening. They may fear not being believed, or worry about retribution if they report.
Police response often varies by gender as well, with some research suggesting that officers take female victims stalked by male perpetrators more seriously than other combinations. The cultural assumption that "real" stalkers are male may make authorities skeptical of other scenarios.
Counterintuitively, in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, strangers are often treated as more dangerous than former partners—despite the fact that intimate-partner stalkers are actually more likely to become violent. The dramatic media narrative of the obsessed stranger has warped public perception and possibly law enforcement priorities.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
What makes stalking uniquely difficult to address is that it exists only as a pattern.
A robbery is a discrete event. An assault happens at a specific time and place. But stalking is distributed across time and space, composed of dozens or hundreds of individual acts that might seem harmless in isolation. Explaining to a police officer that you feel threatened because someone sent you flowers sounds absurd. Explaining that this is the fifty-seventh time they've done something—flowers today, a phone call yesterday, their car parked outside your house last week, a message to your sister two weeks before that—starts to convey the reality.
But that requires documentation. It requires the victim to prove a pattern while living in fear, to keep records while their stalker escalates, to maintain composure while their world contracts into an ever-smaller safe zone.
And even with documentation, prosecution remains challenging. Stalking laws vary dramatically between jurisdictions. The definition of harassment differs from place to place. What constitutes "reasonable fear" is subjective.
The crime hides in plain sight because it's constructed from legal building blocks. You can't ban phone calls. You can't ban sending messages. You can't ban being in public places. You can only try to draw lines around patterns of behavior, and patterns are hard to legislate.
What We Know and What We Don't
Research on stalking is relatively young. The term didn't enter clinical or legal use until the 1990s. We're still building the basic knowledge base.
What we know is troubling. Stalking is common, underreported, and psychologically devastating. It overwhelmingly affects women, primarily perpetrated by men they know. The most dangerous stalkers are former intimate partners, not strangers. Cultural narratives normalize stalking-adjacent behavior and make it harder for victims to recognize and report what's happening to them.
What we don't know is how to stop it. Treatment programs for stalkers show mixed results. Legal interventions can sometimes escalate rather than deter. Protection orders are pieces of paper, useless against someone determined to violate them.
We don't fully understand why some people become stalkers while others, equally rejected or aggrieved, simply move on with their lives. We don't have good predictions for which stalkers will become violent. We don't know how to change the cultural messages that teach men their persistence is romantic and teach women to doubt their own discomfort.
What we do know is that stalking represents a fundamental violation: someone refusing to accept that another person has the right to reject them, to choose their own relationships, to live their own life unmolested. It's the insistence that one person's desire for connection trumps another person's desire for separation.
And in a world where we borrowed the word from hunting, it's worth remembering what hunters do to their prey.