From the issue dated March 6, 1998
Beyond the Hollywood Myths: Researchers Examine Stalkers and Their Victims
The phenomenon has touched 8% of American women, study finds
By PETER MONAGHAN
If you are being stalked, Hollywood myths aren't likely to throw light on your situation.
You are, after all, unlikely to be a celebrity. You're even less likely to be that other common object of stalking in the movies, the woman about to be attacked by a stranger with a kitchen knife.
Such attacks do occur. But, although they are fodder for the tabloids, research shows they are uncommon in real life.
The misapprehension of stalking is "substantial," says J. Reid Meloy, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego's School of Medicine. "It is fed by the commercial media, which focus on the more lurid, violent cases."
Dr. Meloy and a growing number of other researchers are working to correct such misunderstanding. "Research in this area is very vibrant now," he says.
Public attention to stalking has been galvanized in recent years by cases involving such celebrities as David Letterman and Madonna. As a result of such high-profile incidents, California passed the nation's first anti-stalking law in 1990. Within four years -- as the problem of domestic abuse also drew more attention -- all of the other states had followed suit.
Researchers, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly aware of how common stalking actually is. In looking more closely at the phenomenon, they are focusing not just on the incidence of stalking, but also on the psychology of stalkers and the effects of stalking on its victims.
Their work is bringing to light just who the typical victim is.
She is probably female and in her 20s. Her stalker probably is male and in his 30s, although stalkers range in age from teenager to retiree.
Research reveals patterns to stalking. The victim commonly receives incessant phone calls, gifts, and protestations of affection. She has tried to repulse them for two or more years and has long ceased to find them simply absurd. Indeed, she finds them offensive, even frightening. She wishes that she could leave the house or look out the window without seeing her stalker there, waiting.
He may have stolen her mail, vandalized her property, even have threatened to kill her pets. Maybe he has done so.
Increasingly likely is that he has made use of new communications and information media, like Internet search engines and electronic mail, to track her down, contact her, or shadow her. Researchers call that "cyberstalking," and they take note of the power that it puts in the hands of a stalker.
Whatever the form of stalking, the victim is not alone. The first thorough study of stalking is near completion, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, and it shows that the prevalence of stalking is staggering. Eight per cent of American women -- one in 12 -- have been the object of at least one stalker.
That figure is all the more remarkable given that the Center for Policy Research in Denver, which conducted the survey, used a stringent definition of stalking, developed by the Justice Department in the early 1990s to guide states in creating anti-stalking laws. It defines stalking as "repeated physical or visual proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written, or implied threats" sufficient to cause fear in a "reasonable person."
In analyzing the responses of the 8,000 women and 8,000 men who took part in the survey, "we eliminated all those people who were just distressed," says Patricia Tjaden, the principal investigator. When the definition was loosened to include people who were "only somewhat or a little frightened," she says, "the rates shot right up," to 12 per cent of American women.
When translated into an annual rate, the results based on the more stringent definition indicate that some one million women are stalked each year. Based on the broadened measure, that figure rises to about six million per year.
The survey also found that 400,000 men are stalked each year. It reported that while women are stalked by strangers only 20 per cent of the time, men are much more likely to be stalked by a stranger or a casual acquaintance.
"The prevalence rates really surprised me," says Dr. Meloy. The survey is significant, researchers agree, because it was extensive enough to provide the first clear accounting of the extent of stalking in the United States. "Substantial research in this area really began in the early portion of this decade," he says. "Basically, we're in the early developmental stages."
He has just edited the first collection of research papers on the subject, The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives (Academic Press), due out in May. The 15 papers address psychiatric, psychological, and social perspectives on the behavior. In another sign of growth in the study of stalking, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences devoted a workshop to the subject at its annual meeting last month, in San Francisco.
The data make it clear why research into stalking is important, says Dr. Meloy, who, in addition to his role as a forensic psychologist at San Diego, is a guest lecturer at the School of Law. Last year, he provided prosecutors with psychiatric profiling of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Dr. Meloy points out that even though only a minority of cases lead to assaults -- the study found that 50 per cent of stalkers make threats, but that they act on only 25 per cent of those threats -- and fewer than 2 per cent end in murder, the effects of stalking on many victims are powerful and damaging. The Justice Department survey found that one-third of them had sought psychological treatment.
Those effects are only now coming to be studied. The most detailed research so far is that of Paul E. Mullen, a professor of psychiatry at Monash University, in Australia, who runs a clinic that treats both stalkers and their victims. Seventy per cent of those victims suffer from a form of post-traumatic-stress disorder, he says, and nearly one-quarter have considered suicide.
Help may be on the way, thanks to researchers in psychiatry, psychology, social work, and other fields. But researchers are finding that "none of this stuff is simple," as Dr. Meloy puts it. "People want simplified answers to what isn't." Stalking may turn out to have no single psychiatric diagnosis.
Dr. Mullen, while warning that categorizing stalkers is "probably premature," tentatively suggests some types.
Most common: "the rejected," he says. They include former intimates who can't accept the end of a relationship; suitors spurned by their object of desire; and employees fired or passed over for promotion.
In the Justice Department study, about one-half of the female victims were stalked by ex-partners; the proportion jumped to four-fifths if it included victims who had had at least one date with the stalker.
Another group, says Dr. Mullen, "can only be described as obsessed." They become preoccupied with individuals in their immediate lives, or occasionally with prominent people, he says.
Mental-health professionals commonly refer to such people as erotomanics. Many such stalkers imagine that they have a relationship with the object of their obsession. They sometimes even come to the delusion that their victim is victimizing them.
Another group of stalkers, says Dr. Mullen, "is a mixture of the intellectually limited, the socially disabled, and the plain awkward." For such people, stalking is an attempt at forming relationships.
Quite small, he believes, is the group of stalkers who intend to inflict distress. Their object is revenge, often for unclear reasons. A small number of those stalkers, he adds, are sadistic predators who stalk in preparation for an attack, often a sexual assault.
Researchers are trying to detect the contours and shadings of stalking. In most of the cases that Dr. Meloy has studied, the stalker, several years in the past, had had a failed, long-term, heterosexual relationship. He had also suffered a major loss in the year before beginning to stalk. Some researchers speculate that erotomania is a psychotic variant of mourning.
One tantalizing piece of information, Dr. Meloy says, is that stalkers generally have, early in life, suffered disruptions in the normal pattern of forming attachments to people, such as their parents. That, he suggests, may explain why life events, such as rejection in matters of romance or career, prompt some people to stalk, while other people, at worst, grieve. "Typically, the stalker has a lot of narcissistic personality issues" -- patterns of disturbed relationships between self and others, Dr. Meloy explains. "Oftentimes, his rejection will be very humiliating. He manages his humiliation by instead feeling rage or anger. Those feelings fuel the pursuit of the victim."
The Justice Department study makes clear that many victims understand their circumstances: In more than a few cases, they know that the stalker wants to control or scare them into returning to, or staying in, an intimate relationship.
A link with partner abuse is evident in other ways, too. Very often, stalkers of women are intimates or ex-intimates who inflicted physical or sexual abuse in the relationship. Put stalking in that context, suggests Dr. Tjaden of the Denver research center, and it seems awfully familiar.
The attention it gets today resembles the attention that was paid to domestic violence 10 years ago, says Doreen Orion, a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Until then, she suggests, "no one knew what to do, but as it was studied more, and its prevalence became known, public policy and attitudes changed."
Dr. Orion knows stalking well. She wrote of her own experience in I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love (Macmillan, 1997). A former patient has stalked her for eight years -- and continues to do so.
Like most stalking victims, she found that localities have trouble enforcing stalking laws. She says that police know little about the behavior. She often provides lectures to police recruits, just as she does to psychiatry and psychology students. "I tell medical residents, 'This could happen to you,'" she says.
Not surprisingly, therapists are common targets of stalking. Other high-risk groups, researchers say, are health professionals, lawyers -- and adult-education teachers.
A few researchers who study stalking have found that their expertise is in demand from celebrities -- entertainment figures, sports stars, politicians -- and others who can afford the tab.
Dr. Meloy suggests that researchers need to work on understanding the long-term behavior of stalkers, and on assessing the risk of violence. "We need research on domestically violent males, to predict who will stalk and who won't."
Dr. Mullen notes that researchers do not yet have a clear picture of what distinguishes stalking from related but accepted expressions of ardor. In a way, he points out, stalking can be seen as "a pathological extension of love."
Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
