when are we going to get wise to stalker violence?

By alice | November 13, 2009

The perpetrator of a particularly shocking and horrific crime has been jailed in Britain. Where are the obvious positive suggestions and changes that need to be made? You don’t have to read the article- here are the lessons I want to see being learned and used:

1. Women need to know when men are showing signs of becoming dangerous.
2. They need to know how to interact safely with potentially dangerous men: how to interpret different kinds of refusal to go away, and when and how to ignore rather than engaging with requests to go away.
3. Someone needs to monitor the online activities of potentially violent people. It’s almost routine now for attackers to threaten violence online before committing it. Perhaps this is a sort of “cry for help” which nobody is noticing or taking seriously- either way, it needs to be acted on.
4. A woman under threat needs physical protection of some kind. Doors can be broken down and are not enough. Bodyguards able to defend against violence if police are not available, or some way of going into hiding temporarily, or someone watching the premises from outside 24/7.
5. Any suspicious or notable activity by stalkers needs to be noted and related to his monitored position, so they are not able to manipulate or divert police resources.
6. Not relevant to this particular case, but we need to accept that restraining orders don’t work with people considering violent acts because they are based on respect for the law, not actual restraint.

We find it difficult to deal with people who threaten violence because our legal system is supposed to treat people as innocent until they have committed a crime. Monitoring uncommitted crimes is an area where we feel uncomfortable. But international terrorism has made it necessary to get to grips with not-yet-committed crimes; stalker attacks, a kind of individual victim terrorism, are often similarly dangerous, horrific and incomprehensible crimes, but we have not yet gone anywhere near far enough in learning how effectively to prevent them.

We need to accept the responsibility of preventing violent crime as far as possible, and do so in a way that maintains common-sense priorities. Police services everywhere need to read The Gift of Fear and get one of Gavin De Becker’s people to train them on how to handle things better. The knowledge is out there, what’s missing is our commitment to learning how to use it. We’re very culturally dozy on this issue.

4 Comments »

4 Responses to “when are we going to get wise to stalker violence?”

Shefaly Says:
November 14th, 2009 at 4:02 am

Everything you say about women is also equally applicable to men as victims. As a society we need to understand that stalking is a gender-neutral crime. :-/

alice Says:
November 14th, 2009 at 10:21 am

I don’t know if it’s statistically as applicable, but of course it is logically applicable. I’m using female here for generalisation rather than to exclude.

Shefaly Says:
November 14th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

Yes, as soon as I wrote that comment, I wondered if data were available on men being stalked and harassed. But as we know in social sciences it has often been the case of not looking actively. Now that we are, we know of domestic violence against men as well as extortion etc being quite prevalent. :-/

In another context, a public health academic said of diabetes diagnoses being on the rise: “To invoke a religious metaphor, diabetes is like Jesus; if you look for it, you will find it.” Chuckleworthy argument but not a chuckleworthy issue.

The Crime of Stalking Says:
November 20th, 2009 at 12:03 am

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