Title: Stalking and its consequences

Name: Vidhi Patadia

Roll No.: 41

Class: FYBFM

Subject: Foundation course 2

Sr.No. Name of the Page No.

subtopic
1 Introduction 1,2,3,4

2 Meaning 4

3 Discussion 5,6,7,8

4 Methodology 8,9,10

5 Conclusion 10,11,12

Introduction:
Crime is an act or an omission which is universal or we can say it is in every bit of society
and knowingly and unknowingly most part of the society is involved in it. To understand the
crime there is no any universally accepted definition but there are different views of jurists
and philosophers, but from a legal and legislative perspective – A crime is an act or omission
which is illegal or which is against the law, and the wrongdoer is liable for punishment. The
prosecution of case is started by state. There are innumerable types and classes of crimes and
is continuously increasing. Stalking is one of them and was added in criminal laws of India
after 2013 Criminal Amendment Act passed by the Justice Verma Committee due to the
increasing number of crimes against modesty of women in society. Stalking is
communication crime and it should not be gender biased but in our country stalking is held
only against the women’s. In general anyone can be stalked and can stalk without even
knowing most of the times, because in our society following someone, calling someone,
asking someone, staring at someone, etc is not accepted as a crime until a legal action is not
taken against him/her.

Stalking has been defined by as a set of repetitive behavior directed toward a target that
perceives those behavior as unwelcome and intrusive. As a consequence, victims of stalking
experience fear for their safety and/or for closure. Since the 1990s, national surveys have
been made in several countries using different criteria both to define the phenomenon (e.g.,
the duration of the stalking campaign), the method used (e.g., interview by phone or online
survey), and the gender of the subject involved (female and/or male). This limitation did not
allow the stalking campaign to be defined in a unique way, influencing the boundaries of the
phenomenon. Despite these limitations, identified the prevalence rate of victimization among
females and males in the general population. While the prevalence rate in females ranged
from 8 to 32%, the range was 2–13% in males. Thus, the risk of victimization among females
is higher, particularly in young individuals (18–29 years) and may extend to when the stalker
tries to establish or re-establish a relationship. On average, the analysis of the literature
by highlighted a duration of 22 months, with a frequency of the contact that found in their
investigation to be ‘every day’ for more than one third of the victims.
Further research tried to understand the nature of the victim–stalker relationship and previous
domestic violence (defined as “any violence between current or former partners in an
intimate relationship, wherever and whenever the violence occurs the behavior that
characterized the stalking campaign, the physical and emotional consequences, and the
coping strategies adopted. Regarding this relationship, described the stalker as an ex-intimate,
an acquaintance (e.g., friend, relative, colleague, or patient) or a stranger. From their work, it
appears that prior domestic violence increases the chances of becoming a victim of stalking.
Moreover, as underlined by, if the intimate relationship was characterized by violence, this
will be perpetrated also during the stalking campaign; the end of the relationship is not the
end of the abusive behavior. The behaviors that characterize the stalking campaign have been
described as unwanted communication (any contact with the stalkers, such as telephone calls,
e-mails, letters or cards, text messages), unwanted approaches (the stalker followed, damaged
property, visited or waited outside home and/or workplace), harassment and intimidation
(threats, asking for information, spreading lies). In their investigation, in which 107 victims
of stalking were involved, found that the majority of participants reported they had
experienced partner abuse before the beginning of the stalking campaign (caused by the end
of the relationship). Among these, the findings revealed that stalking victims suffer from a
very diverse spectrum of behaviors, more frequently unwanted communication and contact,
while harassment and intimidation are the least frequent. The stalking campaign leads to
physical and emotive consequences for the victims, described by as ‘soul destroying.’ Among
the physical consequences, indicated e.g., forms of addictions, appetite, or sleep disturbances,
while among the emotive consequences they suggested the examples of anger, confusion, and
fear. highlighted the importance of investigating depressive and anxious reactions because
these symptoms are linked to the experience of stalking victimization, in particular in victims
of ex-partners To confirm this, findings from the investigation by which involved 1,214 self-
defined stalking victims, showed that victims who had a prior relationship with their stalkers
were more likely to experience a greater number of emotive, physical, and social
consequences than other types of victim–stalker relationships. To cope with the phenomenon,
victims use several strategies. categorized these coping strategies

(1) Moving toward involves trying to ‘reason with’ the stalker, to negotiate a different type
of relationship (e.g., moving from a closer intimate relationship to a closer friendship)
or asking the stalker to stop their campaign (e.g., reasoning with the stalker);
(2) Moving away involves the avoidance and limitation of the access of the stalker (e.g.,
ignoring the stalker);
(3) Moving against involves threatening, harming, or otherwise deterring the stalker (e.g.,
threatening him/her verbally);
(4) Moving inward involves “any effort or acts to repair, empower, enrich, or merely focus
on self as the source of managing the disruption of unwanted pursuit, independent of
others role in the episode
(5) Moving outward involves seeking help, guidance, and assistance (e.g., told a friend,
relative, or neighbuor ).

highlighted that victims engage in multiple strategies to cope with stalking

campaigns. highlighted that the most used coping strategies by victims of stalking, previously
victims of domestic violence, were to search for help from friends or family (moving
outward, following the categorization of the coping strategies suggested by Spitzberg and
Cupach), to negotiate with and to confront the stalker (moving toward), and to avoid the
stalker (moving away).
An analysis of the literature revealed that one of the samples most investigated was HCPs
Findings from investigations involving psychiatrists, physicians, nurses, psychologists, and
among others have shown that this population is at higher risk of victimization than the
general population. In their literature analysis, argued that the average incidence was 13.9%
for samples from ordinary populations, while the prevalence rate of victimization in HCPs
ranged from 12 to 50%. In this population, the risk of victimization has been linked to both to
the nature of their work and to the expectation about the engagement in the relationship.
HCPs have close contact with people suffering from physical and/or mental disease. Their
professional behavior, involving being devoted to caring for the patient, could be
misunderstood as a desire to begin a relationship (intimate romantic or non-romantic). The
motion to change the nature of the relationship from the HCP could cause disillusioned
beliefs, feelings of frustration, desires of revenge, and so on. Thus, a stalking campaign
begins with the aim of establishing a relationship. On the other hand, people (partners,
friends, and relatives) have expectations about the quality of the care that HCPs provide, also
outside the workplace. These expectations are linked to the attention to the relationship and,
as has emerged in previous research the failure to fulfil it could trigger emotive reactions
such as anger and jealousy. In this case, the stalking campaign could begin with the desire of
revenge.
A gap in the literature is related to the experience of domestic violence in this population and
the experience of stalking victimization. An analysis of the literature showed that HCPs are
asked to prevent and/or to intervene in domestic violence. The possibility that they could
themselves be victims of domestic violence was not considered. However, previous
investigations showed that HCPs are victims by acquaintances and ex-partners

Meaning:
Stalking is defined in Indian Penal code under section 354D but firstly it can be understood
through

• Continuous and repeated following someone with ill intention of harming or

causing fear to the person followed is said to be stalking.
• A crime of engaging in a course of conduct directed at a person that serves no
legitimate purpose and seriously alarms, annoys, or intimidates that person.

• The crime of illegally following and watching someone over a period of time.

• Stalking is the wilful, malicious, and repeated following or harassing of another

person that threatens his or her safety.
Discussion:

The aim of this work was to compare female and male HCP victims of domestic violence and
stalking. The findings showed that, for the most part, the victims experienced stalking by a
stalker who was not of the same gender, confirming that the phenomenon is most frequently
inter-gender, particularly when the victim was a female. Moreover, the nature of the
relationship was romantic for the most part for victims, both female and male, suggesting that
the principal motivation of stalking was the disruption of an intimate relationship. Regarding
the domestic violence, females described the phenomenon from a different perspective,
indicating the verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, while males indicated only the verbal abuse.
These findings did not support those from investigations of male victims of domestic
violence by the men were physically as well as the psychologically abused females, and were
often an (ex)-partners. Interestingly, in our sample, male victims of stalking were more prone
to experience unwanted written communication than females. This confirmed that female
stalkers tend to adopt more behaviors that permit them to be connected with their victims.
The duration of the stalking campaigns was similar in both females and males, with a little
longer duration in males; as suggested by, female stalkers are more patient and tough. Male
victims are also more prone than females to express anger with their stalkers, though they did
not reach threshold values from the psychopathological point of view. This finding confirmed
that the expression of this feeling is culturally associated with men.
From the screening for depression, BDI emerged that the discouragement did not prevail for
the most part in either male or female victims. However, females tend to amplify, more than
males, depression, state, and trait anxiety (in particular the moderate level of trait anxiety).
The expression of anxiety symptoms was also seen through the body; indeed, females
experienced somatic and cognitive (such as confusion) symptoms. Moreover, in females,
there was a higher influence of the victimization in some cognitive aspects that could have
had an impact on work efficiency, on the ability to apply social and organizational rules,
medical procedures, and to care the patients. The anxiety and the somatization were evident,
for example, in the higher percentage of sleep disturbances in female. Even if all symptoms
were expressed in both females and males, in males a lack of confidence in their body and of
their emotional literacy makes the expression of distress (in each channel, such as emotive
and cognitive) more difficult. At the same time, the expression of anxiety presented in
women is permitted to become progressively less victimized over time; depression and
anxiety permitted the recognition of these symptoms as signs of distress and to intervene to
reduce them.
An interesting finding was in regard to the coping strategies. Victims, both female and male,
involved in this investigation confirmed that the coping strategy of moving away was the
most used in this population alone or in association with another. However, our findings
suggested that when harassment behavior increased, the number of coping strategies adopted
by the victims decreased. An explanation could be in the fatigue resulting from coping with
repetitive and intrusive behavior that distress the victim leading to exultation. This result was
not in accordance with who argued that “the more a person is obsessively pursued, the more
this person attempts to cope, and the increased coping is merely a barometer of the stalking
and its disruptiveness, rather than a method of effectively diminishing the negative effects of
the stalking” .According to, the link between coping strategies and the stalking campaign
needs attention from scholars; the adoption of an appropriate coping strategy (e.g., sought
help from colleagues) could determine the stop of the stalking campaign. In particular, in
HCP victims of stalking, the urgency to intervene is linked to the need to limit the
consequence of the stalking campaign, in order to be efficient and effective at work.
There were, of course, limitations to this study. First, since the sample was non-randomly
selected, the results should be taken with caution and should not be generalized. Moreover,
the sexual orientation of the stalker and victim was not investigated; thus, comparisons
between heterosexual and non-heterosexual individuals were not made. Studies that had
directly assessed the stalking campaign based on sexual orientation found that men were
more likely to engage in a stalking campaign at the end of a relationship than women were
Furthermore, in this current study, the data on the contradiction between being HCP victim of
stalking/domestic violence and caring for victims of stalking/domestic violence were not
collected. Future research should investigate the psychological impact in HCPs who are
victims of stalking and domestic violence and caring for victims of stalking and domestic
violence. At least one other limitation was in reference to the domestic violence experience.
Our work was based on the more well-known categorization of domestic violence [physical,
sexual, emotive but the questionnaire was not tailored to provide detailed information about
the experience (for example the economic violence or violence associated with
ethnic/religious motives were not investigated). We suggest that future studies examine the
experience of domestic violence and its link with sexual orientation and stalking
victimization in a more comprehensive way. As argued by, the study of those variables could
allow a better understanding of the dynamics of the stalking phenomenon, its consequences
and for the exploration of the efficacy of coping strategies adopted by victims and their social
context.
Despite these limitations, we hope this study offers interesting insights and suggests
implications for HCPs and the organization in which they are working. First, attention is
generally focused on female victims of domestic violence and stalking. This study highlights,
one more time, the importance of considering men as potential victims of domestic violence
and stalking. The indication is that HCPs, and the entire health care system, need to improve
their ability to recognize the signs of victimization in men, to provide more suitable
intervention for individuals and the social context (e.g., to protect them and their families).
Moreover, the auspice is to consider HCPs not only as providers of care in victims of
domestic violence and stalking but also as potential victims themselves. For HCP victims of
domestic violence and stalking, due to the nature of their work, it could be more difficult to
admit the victimization, particularly when the nature of experiencing violence is intimate. At
the same time, the perceived contradiction of being victims and providers of care in
victimization cases could result in a minimization or a denial of the problem. Clearly, such an
attitude can be harmful both for the patient/victims and for the HCP victims. In HCP victims,
the experience could result in a reluctance to seek support, with a consequently prolonged
exposure to the stalking campaign and its effect on well-being. Finally, health care
organizations (e.g., hospitals) should contribute to prevent of the phenomenon and should
intervene in domestic violence and stalking phenomena. Prevention programs include, for
example, information courses on the phenomena (e.g., underlying the prevalence of
victimization among HCPs), the risk of victimization (in the general population and in HCP
population), and defence strategies (also those offered by the Italian anti-stalking law). Health
care organizations should also offer individual measures, such as intervention programs,
counselling, and psychological help, to reflect on victimization experiences. Future research
should look to replicate – with a larger sample – the current analyses to test the psychological
impact of the different forms of domestic violence in HCPs victims of stalking.

Methodology:
Participants
The data were collected with the cooperation of four distinct police units. These belonged to
two different types of forces, the (State Police) of all three cities, and the (Municipal Police)
of the larger one. Among the responsibilities of the State Police of course is to protect the
citizens from violent behaviours this role of theirs is common knowledge of the population.
The Municipal Police were chosen because, differently to the other forces, they have set up a
unit specializing in cases of stalking. This is well known locally because they offer
information days open to the public to spread awareness about stalking, organize training
courses in schools, and give out information brochures.

Analyses were performed on 271 files classified by police officers as cases of stalking (based
on art. 612/bis of the Italian criminal law mentioned above). All the files contained
sociodemographic details about the victim (e.g., sex and age), details about the stalker (e.g.,
sex, if known), a description of the relationship between the victim and the stalker, and a
description of the stalking campaign (duration, frequency of contact, behaviours enacted by
the presumed offender, consequences, and coping strategies on the part of the victim).

Of the 271 victims, 87 (32.1%) were men, 184 (67.9%) women. Overall, victims were on
average 40.71 years old The majority were single (89, 32.8%), 42 (15.5%) were divorced, 40
(14.8%) were married, 14 (5.2%) were engaged, 11 (4.1%) cohabited, and one (0.4%) was a
widow. Information about marital status was not available in other 74 cases.

Most perpetrators were males (203, 74.9% vs. 66 females, 24.4%). This information was
unreported in two cases. The stalker was an ex-partner in 170 cases (62.7%) and an
acquaintance in 90 cases (33.2%); in 11 cases (4.1%), his or her identity remained unknown.
The stalkers were, on average, 43.24 years old age was undetermined in 17 cases. The
stalker’s marital status was single in 101 cases (37.3%), divorced in 47 (17.3%), married in
16 (5.9%), engaged in three (1.1%), cohabitant in two (0.7%), widowed in one (0.4%), and
undefined in the remaining 101. 32 perpetrators stalked more than a person (for example the
ex-partner and his/her parents). The average duration of the stalking campaign at the time of
the report was 96 weeks that is 1.8 years.
Measure

The police reports of stalking offences available from 2009 (when, as mentioned above,
relevant laws were introduced in Italy) to 2018 were transcribed. In compliance with the
Italian law on personal data protection, all sensitive data (e.g., name/surname and
identification codes of the persons involved) were stripped. The remaining, non-sensitive data
were then analysed with a grid obtained from a modified version of the questionnaire on
stalking constructed by the Network for Surviving Stalking (NSS) and Dr. Lorraine Sheridan
(Forensic Psychologist, Curtin University, Australia). This questionnaire has already been
used in research on stalking in the Italian context [33]. It covers the following information,
when available:

• the demographic details of the victim: sex, age, marital state (3 items);
• the demographic details of the stalker: sex, age, marital state (3 items);
• the duration of the stalking campaign (1 item);
• the frequency of behaviours, categorized as: one or more times a day, one or more
times a week, one or more times a month, or less than one time a month (1 item);
• the nature of the relationship between the victim and the stalker, categorized as ex-
partners, acquaintances or unknown (1 item each, yes/no response);
• the motives of the campaign as reported by the victims, e.g., ‘quarrels with
neighbours’ (5 items, yes/no responses)
• third parties possibly harassed in their turn during the campaign, e.g., ‘son/daughter’
(7 items, yes/no responses);
• the presence of domestic violence, with possible responses being no; yes, physical
violence; yes, emotional violence; or yes, physical and emotional violence (1 item
each, yes/no responses);
• the kinds of stalking behaviours, e.g., ‘the stalker sends e-mails to the victim’ (18
items; yes/no responses);
• the consequences of the stalking campaign in terms of physical (7 items, e.g.
headache) and emotional (12 items, e.g. fear) symptoms; possible responses also
included ‘other symptoms’;
• lastly, the coping strategies adopted, e.g., ‘talk to stalker’ (13 items; yes/no
responses).
Procedures

The data were collected by one of the authors of this paper with help from research assistants
trained by the same researcher. One of the authors contacted the four police units, which all
agreed to participate in the project. During a formal meeting with the chiefs of the police
forces and their delegates, the aims and procedure of the research and its implications were
explained and discussed. After the final approval of the project, all the officers were informed
that their units were going to be involved in an investigation of the stalking reports. One
officer from each unit was appointed to supervise that the proceedings would comply the
privacy requirements of the Italian law (namely, redaction of sensitive data). The remaining
contents of the reports were transcribed into a new SPSS file. Data collection took about one
week for unit. The resulting file was processed with SPSS 22 to produce mainly descriptive
and inferential statistics. Descriptive measures (frequencies, means ± SD) were calculated for
all test variables; χ2 tests were used to measure the differences. T-tests were used to examine
the differences between the mean scores of the sexes for each variable; the results were
considered statistically significant for p < .05. Correlations were calculated between the
duration of the stalking behaviour, the type of stalking behaviours, the type of physical and
emotional symptoms reported, and the coping strategies used by men and women as listed in
the questionnaire.
Ethical statement

This research conformed to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki in 1995, as revised
in the Edinburgh meeting of 2000 . All the relevant ethical guidelines were followed,
including compliance with the requirements of Italian legislation.

More specifically: Approval of the research project: The research project was approved by
the Ethics Committee of the before the study began (n. 23622-15/07/2015). Since there was
no medical treatment or other procedures that could cause biological, psychological or social
harm to the police officers involved, additional ethical approval was not required. Police
personnel: The chief of each police unit involved appointed one of their officers to
collaborate to the research. These delegates were authorized to log into the files of their unit;
their collaboration consisted in general help to the researchers as well as, specifically, in
redacting all the sensitive data contained in the reports. The letter of informed consent given
to both the chiefs and the delegates clearly stated the goals of the research, the voluntary
nature of participation, the types of data investigated and their statistical processing, and the
anonymity of the procedures employed. (iii) Denouncers, i.e., presumed victims: The oral
informed consent of whomever asks to file a report to the police is routinely obtained by the
officers during the interview. This is also the case with reports of stalking. The report and all
the information it contains is then undersigned by the denouncer. By this act, he or she
authorizes the police to treat the information gathered according to further investigative and
judiciary needs and proceedings, as well as to anonymized elaboration for statistical and
scientific purposes. It is important to notice here that we as researchers had no personal
contact with the denouncers: we only had access to their reports as collected at previous times
by the police officers. The officers involved took care to eliminate the personally identifiable
information from a copy of the files before passing them to us. Nobody, including the
officers, received any compensation for their participation.
Conclusion:
In India, stalking is very common and can either be done physically or through electronic
mediums in different modes as elaborated above, which constitutes to a criminal offence with
an imprisonment of min. 3 years.

In India the working professional, students, housewife and many women get stalked on
regular basis without even knowing and not only the women’s but also the men. And stalking
and harassing is not treated as serious crime and due to the fear of being stalked many women
and girls avoid getting out of their house. In order to avoid stalking and attracting unwanted
distress the women are forced to dress so called “modestly” and to be inside the houses
before sunset and to keep professional and limited relations from colleagues, neighbours, and
other persons so that they don’t attract unwanted attention. Even after the 73 years of
independence women are still caged. The physical and emotional effects of stalking on the
victims and their families and friends are traumatic and should not be underestimated. The
effects parallel those who are the victims of PTSD and other severe injuries and disorders.
Research is needed to identify which characteristics worsen the physical and emotional
effects of stalking. Additional research on the types of stalking, the nature of the
offender/victim relationships, and the characteristics of the stalkers and survivors will
provide new data on the association between stalking and trauma. Messages broadcast in
response to the COVID-19 crisis have urged us to stay safe at home but this may not be an
option for many stalking victims. While lockdown might appear to be a time when victims
are less accessible to their stalkers, the early evidence from this study suggests that their
vulnerability has increased. It has been argued that ‘one of the more terrifying tactics used by
stalkers is to make the victim feel that she has no privacy, security, or safety, and that the
stalker knows and sees everything’. The COVID-19 crisis has made victims more accessible
to perpetrators whose surveillance tactics appear to have intensified. In this context, isolation
and fear may be exacerbated for victims. While increasing opportunities for perpetrators to
stalk their victims, digital technology can enable offer positive opportunities for contact with
support networks. The unique risks for stalking victims in this context require a bespoke
response which is currently lacking.

The lack of awareness surrounding stalking and appropriate responses is linked to a lack of
resources around IPV generally and stalking specifically. Policy makers need to be alerted to
the extent and severity of risks for stalking victims if resources are to be directed to specialist
intervention and prevention services, both during the COVID-19 crisis and afterwards.
Research on previous pandemics does not appear to have considered the impact on stalking,
although recent work highlights risk factors for increased violence against women and
children more broadly. First et al.’s work around violence after a disaster provides some
helpful suggestions to consider the extent of potential issues in the longer-term, such as
community education and awareness programmes. Further research is needed to establish
whether the early indications from this study are representative of victims’ experiences more
broadly. It would be helpful to investigate the impact of different aspects of intersectionality
such as poverty, race, ethnicity, age, ability or religion. Such research could help inform the
service response during a pandemic as well as strengthening the response to stalking victims
in the longer term. Despite these limitations, the study yielded a good deal of information. It
revealed that men tend to let a stalking campaign last for a long time before reporting it to
police. This may have consequences on the victims’ wellbeing, especially in the emotional
sphere. To worsen the situation, the coping strategies generally adopted by men are not
effective and may even hamper the work of the police officers who must intervene and
investigate the case. It might then be useful to strengthen and improve the government’s
efforts to promote the public awareness of the whole stalking phenomenon; sex/gender
characterizations should be stripped off the social campaigns to change the public perception
of stalking as exclusively involving women. The biased representation of stalking in the
media and in the social campaigns is also likely to further diminish the tendency for men to
protect themselves and to add a sense of shame to an already intense emotional burden. A
different approach might legitimize men to recognize themselves as victims of stalking as
well as allow third parties like relatives, friends, and colleagues to recognize the signs of
victimization in men. A prompt intervention by police officers could provide more suitable
interventions for men and their families. Also, the schema employed in the interviews with
victims of stalking should be improved and made more flexible and more capable of
including “semantic”, “lived” information. Finally, in the promotion of individual and social
awareness of stalking, the different roles and effectiveness of the various strategies ought to
be emphasized: e.g., to collect evidence and to seek help are a lot more useful than other
strategies in decreasing individual discomfort and increasing collective security, and also
allow police officers to devise more appropriate interventions. Little research has attempted
to investigate the nature of cyberstalking and its impact on victims. This study might be taken
to suggest that cyberstalking is a fairly common behaviour that may affect a relatively large
section of society. For instance, allowing for cases that might involve more than one stalker,
it was found that 33.9 percent of respondents had experienced cyberstalking. However, the
use of stricter criteria reduced this figure to 21.9 percent. Most cyberstalking victims were
found to be female, aged 30 years or older and with a good level of education.

A number of behaviours are often associated with cyberstalking but it was found that many of
these activities, such as identity theft and fraud, are not common. The most common
behaviours experienced by respondents involved receiving threats in chat rooms, by e-mail
and via instant messaging software. More than a quarter of respondents (26.79 percent)
reported attempts to monitor their actions by various means. A large group of respondents
(40.48 percent) had experienced attempts to damage their computer systems by the
transmission of malicious software, such as computer viruses. Stalking by proxy also took
place in almost a quarter of cases (23.81 percent).

The level of distress suffered by respondents as a result of their experiences was found to be
disturbingly high. Asked to indicate the level of distress suffered using a scale from 1 to 10,
almost a quarter of respondents (22.8 percent) reported experiencing a level of 10. The mean
level of distress experienced by respondents was 7.16.

Many cyberstalking cases take place over a relatively short period of time. The shortest
period of harassment was two weeks, the longest 38 months. Most cases of harassment (63.2
percent) ended within six months.

More than 42 percent of respondents did not know the identity of the person who harassed
them. Surprisingly, only a small number of respondents claimed to have been harassed by a
former partner (8.77 percent).

It was possible to classify respondents according to their knowledge and experience of

computing. In general, the greater a person’s knowledge and experience of ICT, the less
distressed they were likely to feel as a result of harassment. Furthermore, novice computer
users were likely to receive more threats than expert users, but expert users reported more
attacks on data, hardware and software.

Many of the findings described within this paper conflict with what is known about offline
stalking. For instance, it was found that cyberstalking seems to take place over a shorter
period of time than offline stalking. These findings add strength to the argument that
cyberstalking should be seen as a distinct form of deviant behaviour, albeit one that is related
to offline stalking.

It is clear that not enough information is available in order to gauge the extent to which
cyberstalking affects the members of our society. Further research is needed in order to
develop the themes that have been identified here.