Forensic Psychology For Dummies (137 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
History of violent behaviour
People who have a severe mental disorder (psychosis) are less likely to be violent stalkers than those who don’t suffer from this problem, although those who are psychotic are more likely to stalk people with whom they have had no contact.
Stalkers are typically men in their 40s known to have some established problem of relating to other people. They can be ‘serial stalkers’, moving on from one target to the next.
Stalking isn’t to be confused with the sort of adulation that can come from a fan. Even a person as lacking in celebrity as myself gets the odd letter or other contact from time to time, out of the blue, from someone with whom I’ve had no prior contact at all, who wants to indicate his or her admiration for my work.
Such behaviour is quite different from the secretary who phoned me at home over 100 times a day, demanding I continue her employment after her contract ended. Only after I got a court order to have her desist, under the Protection from Harassment Act that I mentioned earlier, was I able to hear the phone ringing without immediate anxiety.
Trying to explain stalking
Different psychological processes seem to shape different forms of stalking:
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who are the most common, tend to emerge out of the breakdown of an existing relationship. The stalker feels demeaned and helpless and seeks to increase his self-esteem by demoralising and creating anxiety and fear in the former spouse. This behaviour is often a continuation of domestic violence by another means, wanting to control the victim even though she has left him. If the stalker thinks that she’s trying to remove herself even further from his attempts to control her, he may become even more violent. This type of stalking is most likely to lead to murder.
is where the target is a casual acquaintance such as a co-worker or neighbour, or even a celebrity who the stalker has never met, with whom the person desires to establish an intimate relationship. This obsession can also grow out of low self-esteem and depression. The stalker believes that he’ll be more significant if he establishes a relationship with his desired target. He’s likely to re-interpret any response, no matter how negative, as some indication of a desire for a relationship. Or he may resort to violence to gain attention from the victim. The most well-known example of this type of stalker is John Hinckley who shot President Ronald Reagan in the belief that it would make the actress Jodie Foster love him.
is a delusional state where the stalker believes that an intimate relationship with the victim already exists. These people usually have a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, and aren’t able to tell reality from the confused world in which they live. They’re erratic and greatly troubling to their victims but are typically more danger to themselves than anyone else. Margaret Ray was such a woman. For about ten years she believed herself to be the wife of David Letterman, the talk show host, even thinking she had born his children. She broke into his property on many occasions, was arrested driving his car and sent him flowers and sweets. She eventually killed herself.
don’t want to form a relationship with their target. They want to change the behaviour of others or just get revenge for what they regard as an insult, and damage the person or organisation that has caused them hurt. However, what turns their behaviour into stalking is its obsessional quality, with a great deal of activity over a long period of time. If the stalker has some intellectual capability he can become a great expert on the target and ferret out many details that can be used against them, which can be enormously intrusive and disturbing. The stalker gains a feeling of significance and self-worth in the reactions he manages to achieve from his victim.
may consider themselves to be heroes who’re taking on the might of an organisation. Their constant challenge to individuals or groups whose activities or opinions they dislike gives them a sense of achievement, and supports their view of themselves as involved in a just cause. They’d never consider themselves as being in the same class as the other stalkers listed, but their incessant activity beyond the bounds of acceptable political debate and action, marks them out as disturbed individuals whose behaviour owes more to their particular psychology than to the opinions they espouse.
Asking the question: Do stalkers ever stop?
The great challenge of dealing with stalkers is that often they refuse to accept that they’re doing anything wrong. They may see themselves as just like any other infatuated fan, or a lover whose target really wants to reciprocate, or a person on a mission to avenge wrongdoing or stop unacceptable activity. Almost invariably, stalkers have some background of relationship problems and in some cases are clearly mentally ill. These factors all come together to make stopping their stalking behaviour very difficult without addressing the more fundamental aspects of their personality, that lead them to use stalking as a way of dealing with their challenges and frustrations.
The key to getting the stalking to stop is by the victim not giving any indication at all that the stalker exists, or that his actions have any significance. The overt and psychological objective of stalking is to obtain some reaction from the victim: perhaps an indication of the desire for a relationship, new or continued, or to show that the victim is suffering. If the stalkers can’t have that effect they may move on to other targets.