https://www.reddit.com/r/zeronarcissists/comments/1g1tunp/violations_of_privacy_and_law_the_case_of/
created by theconstellinguist on 12/10/2024 at 06:09 UTC*
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Guelke, J., & Sorell, T. (2016). Violations of privacy and law: the case of stalking. *Law, Ethics and Philosophy*, *2016*(4), 32-60.
1: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/78019/
2: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/78019/
An alternative understanding of the feminist critique of privacy, therefore, is that feminists merely want to reject the public/private distinction as it has been understood in the past, from Aristotle on. These feminists are emphasizing that the state must stop ignoring the unbelievable abuses that have been protected in the name of privacy; this is, they believe, a position that is not captured by the public/private position as it has been known and used in prefeminist times and theories” (DeCew 2015: 92-93).
There is indeed clear consensus that most perpetrators of stalking are male and most victims female, though no consensus on what best explains the disparity (Lyndon et al 2012; Davis et al. 2012; Langhinrichsen-Rohling 2012). In the most violent kinds of stalking behavior (including those involving physical threats) it is overwhelmingly men who are the perpetrators and women who are the victims.
“When one takes account of the differentials in resources typically available to men, such as greater physical strength, socially sanctioned power, and control of wealth, it becomes clearer why women will more often be victims of coercive control while in relationships, and persistent pursuit when attempting to leave abusive relationships” (Davis et al. 2012: 337).
e. ‘Persistent pursuit’ is used to refer to “‘ongoing and unwanted pursuit of romantic relationships between individuals [who are either] not currently involved with each other’ or who have broken up with each other” (Davis et al. 2012: 329)
Women, they maintain, are as likely as men to engage in the least serious forms of persistent pursuit such as “following, showing up uninvited, and persistent telephoning, texting, and emailing: The difference is that when women persistently pursue, they don’t have the backing of a broad, well-established cultural system that supports the cultural norm of a woman persistently and aggressively seeking a relationship” (Davis et al. 2012: 332).
We have argued that a description of the core wrong of stalking does not need to refer to power dynamics. However, the core wrong of stalking can of course be exacerbated by power differentials to which gender may well be pertinent.
As articulated by the International covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 17,41 and the associated Human Rights Committee General Comment 16,42 the human right to privacy is a protection against surveillance of one’s home, monitoring of correspondence, and attacks on one’s reputation. Civil and political rights anticipate the whole range or arbitrary and excessive uses of power by states against their own citizens, especially politically active citizens. The right to privacy fits into that scheme: it affords a protected setting not only for conjugal and family life, but for thought and discussion, including thought and discussion that is critical of government and other powerful organizations.
It is true that Article 17 recognizes violations of privacy by natural persons; still, nosey neighbors, voyeurs, or spouses concerned with infidelity probably lie well outside its main ambit. Its focus is on arbitrary official intrusion and disruption, disproportionate police surveillance, disproportionate data retention, and defamation. Encroachments on parental rights to determine the education and religion of their children and even the size of their families are also included. In all of these cases it is against the state that privacy needs defending.
In considering what the state does, it is routine to distinguish between mass and targeted surveillance. Examples of mass surveillance include CCTV and the Internet monitoring system revealed in the Guardian in 2013 and commonly referred to as PRISM. Mass systems attempt to capture information on anyone within a particular area, or carrying out a particular activity. The actual scrutiny involved in mass surveillance tends to be slight, however, because attention must be divided between many different targets. The limits to the degree of individual scrutiny in mass surveillance also restrict how intrusive one can consider the surveillance in question.43
Targeted surveillance is a different matter. By definition it involves intense scrutiny of individuals. Again, targeted surveillance may involve penetration of spaces like the target’s home or car, which are far more protected by law from surveillance than public parks or squares. Furthermore, targeted surveillance involves concentrated attention and scrutiny from a number of people. The targeted monitoring of an individual’s movements throughout public space, by the deployment of a surveillance team, say, will be much more intrusive than a CCTV viewer who notices the same individual as one of many people in the area.
Surveillance techniques can and have been used for repression, for example by the Stasi in East Germany after 1960.44 Some of the techniques of the Stasi are similar to techniques used in contemporary serious crime investigations in liberal jurisdictions. They involve placement of bugs or human intelligence to gain access to the target in private places or tracking the movement and behavior of the target throughout their daily lives. The reach of the Stasi was enormous, with intelligence files on close to a third of the population by the time the Berlin Wall came down. These files were compiled with the willing help of many thousands of informers engaging in surveillance of their neighbors and acquaintances. Stasi targets were not restricted to credible suspects of serious crime; they included anybody who disagreed with the regime, or who was even merely suspected of doing so. The system of surveillance was also sometimes used as a tool to settle private scores that had nothing to do with politics. The Stasi was interested not simply in gathering intelligence but also in intimidating dissidents, smearing their character, and organizing ‘professional failures’. Invasions of privacy, then, were used directly for repression, by making it clear to the target that they were being watched, or that they were targets of smears or coercion. For example, the activist with ‘Women for Peace’, Ulrike Poppe, was not only watched often and subjected to ongoing state scrutiny and detention: she was arrested 14 times between 1974 and 1989; and she was subjected to obvious surveillance, surveillance she could not help but notice, such as men following her as she walked down the street, driving six feet behind her.45 In a case like this, it might be apt to talk about Stasi agents successfully achieving psychological takeover of the target; dominating their thoughts to the point that a normal autonomous life is impossible.
Stasi surveillance is even untypical of surveillance in authoritarian regimes, as much successful repression can be achieved by the more modest means of simply disincentivizing political activity — raising the costs so high that very few will engage in it. This ‘chilling effect’ is often mentioned among the politically important costs of state surveillance policy, often in the course of a more general argument to the effect that modern surveillance unacceptably erodes the private sphere. However, ‘chill’, as distinct from psychological takeover, cannot erode the private sphere completely. For the disincentivization of political activity to be successful there must be a relatively roomy private life that the discouraged activist can retreat into. This means that it can be counterproductive for surveillance in the most repressive states to amount to autonomy-undermining psychological takeover. This can do more than discourage political activity: it can take away sanity when nothing so extreme is required for rendering people apolitical. Stalking does more than disable activist inclinations; it undercuts the conditions for even the apolitical, personal autonomy that activist and non-activist lives alike presuppose.
. Much stalking flows from abusive relationships in which men are the abusers or from a refusal, overwhelmingly on the part of males, to accept rejected romantic overtures. It could be that a will to dominate that pervades many unreformed malefemale interactions partly explains stalking, and is irreducibly political.46 But this would not fully explain the personal harm involved in stalking, nor hence why stalking should be criminalized. The abusive husband does not just represent his gender and arguably gender-based will to dominate through stalking. Nor does his target merely represent ‘womankind’. He acts in his own right —as a person —and his stalking is a serious crime committed against a unique individual.
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