Understanding Stalking Tactics

Hyper-Intimacy

• Reflects courtship activities but taken to an excessive level.
• A situation that is hard for the victim to get free from.
• Prolongs opportunities for contact.

Mediated Contacts

• Efforts to communicate through everything.
• Instant messaging and emails.
• Cyber stalking and Internet use.
• Some stalkers engage in real life stalking.

Interactional Contacts

• Face-to-face interactions.
• Sitting next to the person in public.
• Appearing in various places and intruding on conversations.
• Pursuing common activities and locations.

Surveillance

• Attempts to secure knowledge or information about the victim without their awareness.
• Pursue in person and online to obtain info.

Invasion

• Activities that violate normative prescribed personal and legal boundaries.
• Prior planning is involved.
• Theft of information.
• Poses a risk of legal ramifications.

Harassment and Intimidation

• Can be verbal or non-verbal.
• Causes stress and annoyance.
• Includes insults and harms reputation.

Coercion and Threat

• Occurs across 54% of stalking cases.
• Tone shifts to implicit suggestions of potential harm to the victim.
• Threats against loved ones, pets, and property.
• May involve escalation of previous behaviors.
• Threatening with suicide.

Aggression

• 32% of cases involve physical violence.
• Includes vandalism, assault, and use of weapons.
• Can lead to injury, attempted suicide, and attempted rape.

Moving With Tactics

• Efforts to negotiate with the pursuer.
• Seeking a peaceful end can fail as the stalker may want to speak to them.

Moving Against Tactics

• Threatening injury or deterring the pursuer.
• Threatening to call the police.
• Demonstrates the importance of them in their life.
• Escalates intensity.
• Advised strongly against these tactics.

Moving Away Tactics

• Go where the offender can't go.
• Using undistinguished phone numbers and screening calls.
• Changing email addresses and routes.
• Responsibility of costs.
• Changing physical addresses.

Moving Inward Tactics

• Involves denial and distraction.
• Redefinition.
• Engaging in medication.
• Acting as if the problem is nothing is unlikely to deter the pursuer.

Moving Outwards

• Involves socialization and utilization of third-party assistance.
• Considers the necessity of seeking counseling.
• Involves informal support.
• Contacting law enforcement and obtaining protective orders.

Attachment Theory

• Bonding experiences are between infants and their primary caregivers.
• Securely attached infants derive security from accessible and responsible caregivers.
• Insecurely attached infants experience rejection, abandonment, or indifference.
• The tripartite conceptualization of attachment evolved into 4 categories based on models of self and others:
  • Positively viewed self is worthy of love and support.
  • Negatively views self as unworthy.
  • Positively viewed others are reliable and supportive partners.
  • Negatively viewed others are unreliable/rejecting.
• Attachment tendencies acquired in infancy guide orientation to attachment figures through lifespan; styles of secure attachement, anxious ambivalence and avoidance.
• Securely attached individuals possess a positive view of self.
• Pursue self-acceptance by seeking the acceptance of important others.
• Fearful-avoidant attachments hold negative view of both self and others.
  • Although they desire acceptance, they expect rejection.
• Dismissive-avoidant attachments possess a positive view of self, but a negative view of others.
  • They anticipate being devalued so protect themselves by maintaining distance.
• Two dimensions of avoidance capture the incompatiblity and eschew relationship closeness.
• The dimension of anxiety taps into to worry obsessively about partner abandonment and the loss of desired intimacy.

Relational Goal Pursuit Theory

• People pursue relationships because they are desired end states.
• Great effort is exerted when a relationship goal is thwarted.
• Effort required exceeds the value of the goal, the goal is abandoned in favor of an alternate goal.
• Goals are organized in a hierarchical fashion.
  • Lower-order goals are easily discarded/replaced, but higher-order goals are hardened.
• Goal linking occurs when an individual perceives particular lower-order goals.
  • Possessing a particular relationship with higher-order goals, such as life and self worth.
• Obsessive relational pursuers rationalize that with sufficient effort.
  • Achieved desired goal, believe more persistent goal, striving activity will be successful.
• Obsessive pursuers attribute actions to noble intentions.
  • Pursuing "love" and "connection" justify persistent behaviors.

Stalking Victimization

• The longer of the duration of the stalking - the greater the potential damage to the victim (McEwan et al., 2007)
• The frequency of physical violence in stalking episodes is high.
• The best predictors of risk factors for stalking violence were:
  • A prior intimate relationship between the victim and stalker
  • Victims who shared a prior intimate relationship are at high risk of violence Rosenfeld (2004)
• Presence of explicit threats:
  • Majority do not actually proceed to violence.
  • Have uttered a threat toward prior assault.
• A history of substance abuse is a predictor of future violence
  • Particularly among the mentally disordered
• Absence of psychosis:
  • Psychotic stalkers are less likely to be physically violent than non-psychotic stalkers
• Ex-intimate partners are subjected to longer periods of stalking vs. other relationships.
• Strangers are typically stalked for the shortest duration.

Cyberstalking (Miller 2012)

• Behaviors that involve repeated threats, harassment, or any other unwanted contact using a computer or other electronics.
• Has the effect of making another person feel afraid, intimidated, or concerned for his/her safety.
• Gathering personal, financial, and other information through Internet services.
• Using spyware or keystroke hardware on the victim's computer to monitor communications.
• Using social networking sites, harassing the victim and impersonating them.
• Sending harassing text messages by cell phone.
• Taking surreptitious photos or videos using previously recorded intimate images to.
• Forms of cyberstalking include: -Monitoring the victim's email communication.
  • Sending insulting/threatening emails, sometimes anonymously.
  • Disrupting the victim's email communications by flooding the inbox.
  • Sending a virus/malware program.
  • Using the victim's email identity to send false messages or purchase goods.
• Cyberstalking is frequently used in conjunction with physical stalking and can be considered an extension of it.
• Prior intimate partner stalkers are somewhat less likely to be cyberstalked than stalked because stalker already know them.
• May also be preferred pursuit harassment, or methodology of women stalkers because of the safety and anonymity.

Cupach and Spitzburg Grouped Motives

• Expressive - jealousy, anger, intimacy.
• Instrumental - tangible disputes, control, power.
• Personaliogical - drugs, dependency, mental issue and incompetence.
• Contextual breakup, nostalgia, rival for affections.