Attempts to understand the psychopathology of romantic infatuation and sexual predation are still in their infancy
Tales of the relentless pursuit of a romantic interest date back to antiquity, turning up in the Epic of Gilgamesh. More than 4,000 years from the time that poem emerged, society still runs into enormous difficulties in understanding and dealing with someone who engages in such obsessive and unwanted pursuits. Laws on stalking are still in their infancy. The first U.S. law criminalizing stalking passed in 1990, and within two decades similar laws arose worldwide.
Women and men define stalking differently, as do targets and perpetrators. One 2005 study showed that barely 30 percent of students who read accounts from a case where a perpetrator was actually convicted of cyberstalking identified the behavior as such. In another experiment, women who were presented with one of four vignettes in which a man cyberstalked a woman were more prone to name the situation “stalking” than male participants.
Stalkers and their targets can be any gender, but associated violence is overwhelmingly committed by men who stalk women. Typically, women feel more fear. But women can stalk as well. Female stalkers who target a man, Logan asserts, can wreak tremendous damage to him: to his reputation, his livelihood, his family.
Some psychologists believe that identifying the personality profiles of potential stalkers may be useful. Valshtein and his colleagues have developed a scale to measure what they call “presumptuous romantic intentions.” In their recent Psychological Assessment paper, the researchers asked test takers whether they would engage in certain behaviors—going through a person’s private things, touching a person in an intimate way—regardless of whether their interest was reciprocated.
It’s hard to nail down stalking conviction numbers in the U.S. because of different state laws, Longpré says, but in England and Wales, there are about 15,000 a year. That is a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 million annual occurrences there. Only one in 50 cases is reported, one in 435 is charged, one in 556 is prosecuted, and one in 1,000 is convicted.
Because stalkers are so different from one another, evaluation and treatment are complex, says Kritika Jerath, a co-author of the Psychology, Crime & Law study and a criminologist now at the at the University of Nottingham in England. Some of her colleagues, she says, classify offenders in five sometimes overlapping categories: the ex-partner, the revenger of perceived wrongs, the rejected suitor, the lonely incompetent suitor and the sexual predator.
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