Thirteen years after its introduction as a prosecutable crime, stalking remains a public concern. Each year in the United States, approximately 1 million women and 371,000 men are stalked. Research and clinical practice have revealed that some cases of stalking are associated with high rates of violence. The need for research on these violent offenders is critical. The following article is an o...

The criminalization of stalking has advanced to the international stage. Although primarily limited to the North American, European, and Australian continents, a pattern of behavior that was once looked upon by law enforcement with curiosity, indifference, and even disdain, has become a felony in many jurisdictions around the world. Legal definitions of the crime vary, but it generally contains...

Very little research exists on false reports of stalking. The current work analyzed questionnaires completed by 357 respondents who presented as stalking victims at antistalking charities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. After eight uncertain cases were excluded, the false reporting rate was judged to be 11.5%, with the majority of false victims suffering delusions (70%). Those making...

Studies of violence in stalking have treated interpersonal violence as a homogeneous phenomenon. This study was conducted to ascertain whether the associations of serious violence in stalking are the same as those of general violence in stalking. Of 85 stalkers referred to a forensic service, those who had committed acts of serious violence (homicide and serious assaults) were compared with tho...

OBJECTIVE This paper is the first of a 2-part review on the topic of stalking. It outlines the behaviours involved, epidemiology, motivation of offenders, and mental health consequences for the victim. METHOD Computerized literature searches were used to identify relevant papers from psychiatric and legal journals. Publications by victims' and women's organizations provided additional informa...

Background and Objectives: Community-based studies of stalking in European countries are scarce. The aim of the present study was to replicate the epidemiological study by Dressing and colleagues, which analyzed a sample drawn from a middle-sized German city (Dressing et al., 2005) by using a general population sample (urban as well as rural citizens) from Eastern Austria. Methods: In a survey ...

killings, and combatting international terrorism. I found Prosecutor Rachel Solov’s chapter, “An Operational Approach to Prosecuting Stalking Cases” (Chapter 23), particularly enlightening. She discussed her approach to recognizing stalking behaviors, interacting with victims, sentencing perpetrators, and protecting victims. I know that I will reread several of the chapters in this book. The in...

Victims of stalking often experience a number of negative psychological problems including such things as fear, symptoms of depression, and anger. However, research on factors that lead to these outcomes is limited. The goal of this study was to first identify distinct subgroups of stalking victims based on measures of psychological problems resulting from being stalked. Once identified, the ne...

Over the past 15 years, forensic mental health has become more concerned with the concepts of violence prevention, management, and treatment. The development of specialist tools to aid in the assessment of a range of risks reflects this concern. This article explores contemporary thinking on violence risk assessment and how this knowledge can be applied to the relatively newer field of stalking...