Stalking Awareness Fact Sheet

(info. taken from the Jane Doe, Inc Voices for Change website)

What is Stalking?

Any unwanted contact that communicates a threat or places the victim in fear.
This communication could involve repeated visual or physical contact, verbal, written, or implied threats, nonconsensual communication, or a combination of these measures.

1 out of every 12 women will be stalked during her lifetime and 1 out of every 45 men will be stalked during his lifetime.
On average victims report the stalking lasted 1.8 years:
In cases involving intimate partners, the duration for the stalking increased to 2.2 years.

Stalking victims often live in constant fear that at any moment their safety and lives may be threatened. Never knowing when the threat may become a violent reality, stalking victims experience higher levels of anxiety, severe depression, social dysfunction and insomnia causing significant disruption and altercation of daily life.
30% of female victims and 20% of male victims sought psychological counseling 26% of victims lost time from work and 7 % never retuned to work because of stalking.
Of the 8,000 women and 8,000 men surveyed by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control, the top 3 reasons victims felt they were being stalked were: 1) stalker wanted to control victim 2) stalker wanted to keep victim in relationship, and 3) stalker wanted to scare victim.

Intimate or former intimate partner stalking – The stalker and victim may be married or divorced, may live together or have lived together in the past, may be serious or casual sexual partners, or former sexual partners. There may be a history of sexual or domestic violence in the relationship as well.
Acquaintance stalking – The stalker and victim might know each other casually, as in a co-worker or neighbor relationship
Stranger Stalking – The stalker and victim do not know each other. This also includes cases where the victim may be a celebrity.

Regardless of the gender of the victim, 87% of stalkers overall are men.
Men were identified as the stalker by women 94% of the time and by men 60 % of the time.
55 % of the female victim and 48 % of the male victims reported stalking to police
13.1% of female victims and 9% of male victims, whose stalkers were charges criminally, had their cases prosecuted.
52.8% of female victims and 60% of male victims had their cases result in a conviction.
28% of female victims and 10% of male victims obtained a protection order.
Stalkers violated protection orders in 69% of the cases with female victims and in 81 % of the cases with male victims.