Violations of Privacy and Law: The Case of Stalking (1/4)

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• *Violations of Privacy and Law: The Case of Stalking**

• *Pasteable Citation**

Guelke, J., & Sorell, T. (2016). Violations of privacy and law: the case of stalking. *Law, Ethics and Philosophy*, *2016*(4), 32-60.

• *Link:** **https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/78019/[1]**[2]

1: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/78019/

2: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/78019/

• *Victimology, despite widespread gaslighting, is a real and valid field. The attempts to erase, trivialize and eliminate victimology pretty much exclusively originate with the perpetrator, not the victim, who appreciates its work. A victim is never going to say “playing the victim” and erasing victimology as a valid field in so doing. Victims of stalkers show a low grade fear of the signs the stalker is coming back into their lives in some way. This is best understood as harm to the overall right to expect privacy which the stalker attempts to take away, assuming all sorts of false prosociality, false concerns, and false altruisms similar to the intrusive/illegal sanctionable surveillance state.**

This paper seeks to identify the distinctive moral wrong of stalking and argues that this wrong is serious enough to criminalize. We draw on psychological literature about stalking, distinguishing types of stalkers, their pathologies, and victims. The victimology is the basis for claims about what is wrong with stalking. Close attention to the experiences of victims often reveals an obsessive preoccupation with the stalker and what he will do next. The kind of harm this does is best understood in relation to the value of privacy and conventionally protected zones of privacy

• *State surveillance is just as intrusive as private stalkers, and private stalkers may be particularly interested in working with sanctionable surveillance states as a cover for personal stalking, letting them in the door to engage in this crime on a more widespread level. It is genuinely intrusive, imposing its presence in inappropriate and antisocial ways not befitting a state at every term. Again, if there are personal stalkers unincarcerated in the state, they have particular interest in working with and letting in these states even if it actually leads to an overall collapse of their country’s validity, power and moral justification.**

Further reflection on the seriousness of the invasion of privacy it represents suggests that it is a deeply personal wrong. Indeed, it is usually more serious than obtrusive surveillance by states, precisely because it is more personal. Where state surveillance genuinely is as intrusive as stalking, it tends to adopt the tactics of the stalker, imposing its presence on the activist victim at every turn. Power dynamics —whether rooted in the power of the state or the violence of a stalker —may exacerbate violations of privacy, but the wrong is distinct from violence, threats of violence and other aggression. Nor is stalking a simple expression of a difference in power between stalker and victim, such as a difference due to gender.

• *Stalking is stalking because it is delusional and not based in reality. This includes continuing a disrupted or defunct relationship, or even protecting an imaginary relationship that never existed, does not and will never exist. The delusional nature is the concerning point showing dangerously disturbed mental illness.**

Stalking consists of one person’s keeping track of, and trying to make frequent contact with, another person, who is the subject of the first person’s obsessive thoughts. The contact can take place in physical space or on the Internet. Although there are cases in which the object of obsessive thoughts is unaware of the attentions of the stalker,these are unusual and will be ignored in what follows. Some stalkers target high-profile political figures and think of their own behavior in patriotic or party political terms: these cases, too, will be disregarded. Also to be set aside are cases in which the context for the stalking is some pedagogical or clinical relationship which takes on sexual or romantic significance even if it involves no actual sex. We shall focus instead on what the psychological literature identifies as standard: cases where the basis of the stalking is some temporarily disrupted, defunct, or even imaginary romantic relationship between stalker and target.

• *Stalkers do not see much wrong with stalkers. Since they tend to be dark triad, they are not possessed of normal levels of empathy and do not feel even remotely the damage they have done and are doing. Stalking victims are constantly trying to figure out how the stalker would try to rationalize invading their world, trying to avoid weak links in their social network that give the stalker greater power, trying to capture evidence for prosecution when people reach out about contact initiation by the stalker, deep and pervasive dread when the sick person, the stalker, plays and hints with leaving signs (for example, recently a local newspaper was found in an area where it had no place being; it was just the stalker being an extremely sick and morally disgusting criminal) and trying to avoid hotbed/hotspots that could give the stalker a reason to be around the victim.**

. (1) What, if anything, makes stalking wrong? and (2) If stalking is wrong, is it so seriously wrong that it should be criminalized? Our answer to (2) is ‘Yes’, and the serious wrong involved can be summarized by saying that prolonged stalking often results in a sort of psychological take-over of its target.2 The obsessive character of the stalker’s pursuit can end up being reflected in an obsessive, anxious preoccupation with the “presence” of the stalker on the part of the victim, whether or not that presence is physical. This anxious preoccupation often pervades the stalking target’s waking life, and undermines her capacity to deliberate, choose, and plan. This undermining is the harm that a properly formulated law against stalking should address.

• *Stalkers follow the victim, study their family and relatives when it is not appropriate for them to do so (not in a relationship, never going to be in a relationship, relationship has ended), and disrupting normal social relations (contacting friends and family they have no right or consent to contact with, and having to cut off these connections that are weaker/easily corruptible and letting the perpetrator in with information or going behind her back as aiding and abetting the stalker’s illegal activity). Harassment is different because they don’t actively follow the victim, don’t actively study their network, and don’t actively reach out in disguise or in person without the desire, consent, or sometimes even knowledge of the victims, often under narratives of false altruism/caring when in fact it is all sexual/personal gratification. In addition, stalkers try to violently interrupt the victim’s work life, using any possible narrative they can to make it as hard as possible for them to be independent from the socially violent stalker.**

The stalker imposes his presence typically by following the victim, by penetrating her home, and by disrupting her normal work and social relations. This presence is not always eliminated when the stalker is made the subject of a restraining order or put in prison. Victims of stalking suffer from anxiety, insomnia, greatly disrupted work lives, and loss of confidence. The effects of common or garden harassment can be similar, but they are often tied to a context —a workspace or a shared communal housing space —which does not pervade the victim’s life, and which can be escaped or left.

• *In the most aberrant cases of stalking, the stalker tries to rationalize a way to violate the most intimate details of the victim’s life that absolutely nobody, state or individual, has any legal right into. This shows their aberrant, delusional, and psychopathological proclivities. It shows that precisely because this is the place where they make decisions without external influences, this is deeply threatening to the delusional stalker, and they will do everything to try to gain influence even here, repeatedly pushing up against boundaries that said otherwise.**

In stalking at its worst, the anxiety resulting from it is relatively inescapable and debilitating. It breaches most of a person’s private space, including a person’s inner sanctum: the space in which she deliberates and makes choices without external influences.

• *Behind stalking is an attempt to make the victim completely dependent and to take away their autonomy. The hope is to entirely surround them, watch their every move, be their sole source of livelihood, invade their very core where they make decisions up until that point without the stalker interfering. This last part is especially dangerous as privacy is a fundamental human right that they violate without any remorse (criminal). Independence is found to be** **something that is unappealing and demonized by the stalkers. Due to its hyperfixation, though very similar in destructiveness, illegal state surveillance can even be less bad than stalking.**

Because conventions governing private space, including the space to choose and deliberate without interference, are intimately connected with autonomy, it is hard to separate violations of privacy from attacks on autonomy. We emphasize violations of privacy, because, as it will emerge, we identify the psychological space for deliberation and choice as the most basic of three zones of privacy created by familiar informal conventions governing privacy. Moreover, we argue that in law, policy, and public discussion, the violation of privacy involved in stalking is incorrectly minimized, especially when compared to the intrusiveness of state surveillance. According to us, many forms of state surveillance are less invasive than stalking.

• *Long-time victims of the stalker show a deep anxiety and a pervasive, often tragic, attempt to have anxiety about the stalker’s whereabouts and current situation to feel in control of the crime occurring to them that is ruining their life. A constant calculus to minimize their damage is maintained.**

The rest of this paper is divided into five sections. In section 2, we draw on some of the psychological literature about stalking, distinguishing types of stalkers and their pathologies. We also discuss victims. It is the victimology of stalking that is the basis for claims about what is wrong with stalking and why it ought to be criminalized. Even when stalker and stalking victim are prior acquaintances who are not trying to revive or kindle romance, there is a thread running through the experiences of victims, and that is the obsessive preoccupation with the stalker and what he will do next. The kind of harm this does is best understood in relation to the value of privacy and conventionally protected zones of privacy (section 3). In section 4 we distinguish stalking from harassment in general and consider laws which fail to reflect the distinction between the two offenses. We compare anti-stalking laws in different jurisdictions, claiming that they all fail in some way to capture the distinctive privacy violation it involves. Section 5 considers the role of broader power dynamics and a feminist skepticism about the value of private spaces. Section 6 contrasts the invasiveness of stalking with the invasiveness of state surveillance.

• *Stalkers tend to have been rejected in some way, and are usually people who used to have a relationship and no longer do. However, work-related colleagues or what was meant to be a professional-only interaction can devolve into decades long stalking much greater and longer than the small period where they were in direct contact, often to the great distress of the victim.**

It is rare to be stalked by a stranger.3 Most stalkers are men who are known to their typically female victims.4 Stalkers are often former sexual partners with whom the victim no longer wants a relationship, or else rejected suitors with whom at most non-sexual intimacy was achieved. These two kinds of stalkers, together with work-related colleagues, people met through professional relationships, and neighbors form the category commonly referred to as ‘prior acquaintance’ stalkers. In virtually all studies, whatever the recruitment method or sample size, ‘prior acquaintance’ stalkers account for the majority, sometimes close to 80 percent, of cases (Pathe and Mullen 2002: 289ff.).

• *Stalkers may also be people trying to make frequent contact hoping this will lead to the initiation of a relationship. They clearly do not know how to make these intentions clear and thus they remain stalkers. They tend to be less frightening, and just come off as disturbing.**

Still other stalkers are socially incompetent or isolated people who make frequent contact with the stalking victim as a form of communication of romantic feelings. Stalkers of this kind deludedly hope that frequent contact will make the stalking victim reciprocate these feelings. These stalkers do not necessarily strike the victim as frightening or a likely source of violence.

• *Erotomania can also occur, where a delusional personality confuses high visibility of tabloids with an actual relationship and, because of their own attraction to the visible images, concludes that the person is seeking attention from them because they are in love with them when in reality no such situation exists.**

Much more rare is the classic erotomanic type, usually a woman, who suffers from the delusion that a higher-status man whom she has never met is in love with her.

• *Stalkers tend to have dependency to drugs or alcohol, tend to have unwanted separation from a parental figure, and more weakly but often enough tend to have a foreign nationalization/ethnicity.**

Many stalkers —at least in the samples that have been associated with empirical studies in several countries —have criminal records and psychiatric histories, including histories of addiction to drugs and alcohol, but have better than average education (Hall 2007: 124-31). To the extent that they have been assessed psychologically, a significant number have experienced unwanted separation from parental figures or other adult providers of care or love in their early childhood (Meloy 2007: ch. 3). There is also a weak association between stalking and being a foreigner or cultural outsider.8

• *Stalkers may actively cling to any narrative that demonizes finding a new partner for their victim or prevents the ex-partner from entering into a new relationship well after their relationship has terminated and well after they have ceased to be relevant to their life. These types tend to be specifically antisocial (actual sociopaths/sometimes psychopaths).**

The most severe stalking behavior —the most persistent, the most likely to involve violence, obtrusive following, surveillance at home, and frequent telephone contact —is associated with highly controlling ex-partners. Such stalkers sometimes seek to re-establish a cohabiting relationship, but they can also try to prevent the formation of new relationships by expartners. Where children are involved and they have visitation rights, stalkers of this kind often have a range of pretexts for maintaining contact with an unwilling ex-partner, and it is particularly difficult for the victim to extricate herself. Stalkers in this category often exhibit the symptoms of anti-social personality disorders (ASPD).9

• *Narcissist stalkers in particular stalk their victims feeling shorted of the admiration and attention to them they feel they are owed. (They are not.)**

Related personality disorders —borderline10 personality disorder, histrionic11 and narcissistic12 personality disorders —are also associated with violent stalking and may co-exist with or be confused with ASPD.13 In borderline personality disorder there are frequent changes of mood and threats of suicide as well as signs of paranoia. Again, “individuals create a sense of the importance or depth of the relationship that is not consistent with their partner’s attachment” (Meloy 2007: 74). This same delusion of depth is associated with histrionic personality disorder. “Individuals become uncomfortable if they are not the center of attention” and “often use their physical appearance, usually eroticized, to create attention” (ibid). As for narcissistic disorder, this is associated with a pathological need for admiration and is sometimes thought to run through the whole variety of stalker profiles (ibid).

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