Gender and violence: Women's responses to being stalked

Stalking became defined as a social problem in the U.S. in 1990, after several celebrities and extensive media attention revealed that the targets of stalking are not merely harassed, but are victimized similarly to other victims of violent crimes. Scholarly and legal definitions of stalking rest on three criteria: (a) a pattern of harassing behavior by the stalker; (b) use of force or threat of force and/or intimidation; and (c) the target's admission to feeling fearful. Targets are not defined as having been stalked unless they were afraid, making this crime unique among crimes of interpersonal violence. Using a national random sample of 8,000 adult women (between the ages of 18 and 65+), analyzes who is stalked, relations between target and stalker, and the effects of being stalked on targets. Seventeen percent of women said they had been stalked (N = 1,336), 83 percent had not (N = 6,665), suggesting that the problem is perhaps more widespread than generally thought.;My analysis focused on four dependent concepts: (1) who was stalked versus not; (2) whether the target felt fearful; (3) the amount of personal distress caused by the stalking; and (4) the level of "institutional" response by the targeted woman. The predictor concepts included: (1) the number of stalking experiences endured; (2) the relationship between the stalker and the target (spouse/partner or ex- or other family member, boyfriend, acquaintance, and stranger); (3) the content of the stalking practices (physical monitoring, communicative monitoring, and other); (4) the experience of fear; and (5) women's sociodemographic characteristics.;Using logistic and multivariate regression analyses, the results show Hypotheses 1 through 11 were borne out, with some qualifications. Among the findings that I consider most important are the following: (a) women who did not feel fearful after being stalked will not be defined by the legal system as crime victims; this finding has particular significance for African-American women who expressed less fear than while women and other women; (b) women who have been stalked have their lives disrupted; some women are unable to work, sought therapy, or used the legal system to stop their stalkers; and (c) I use multivariate analyses on a national sample of women to explain the effects of stalking; a number of studies focus on the stalker and not the target or use a domain specific sample.