Stalking--

Hi guys-- I know these are slightly long-- but really worth reading if you have any interest in understanding more of the dynamics involved in stalking-- Christy B wrote the first Piece and Christina D wrote the second-- they are both great--

also the link about alpha dog that is to MSNBC dateline is the one that i found to be most comprehensive although christy and Kayla have both posted some other great links!

The first article I read was a study by Purcell, Pathe, and Mullen (2001) who compared female to male stalkers, with an emphasis on the characteristics of female stalkers in particular, since they are the minority. They looked at 40 female and 150 male stalkers who were referred to a forensic mental health clinic, so out of the total 190 stalker sample only 21% were female. In terms of demographics they didn’t differ on anything except that female stalkers were significantly less likely to have a history of criminal offenses. A significant number of participants were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, with the most common being: delusional disorders, dependent personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. This makes sense because each one of these disorders could directly relate to stalking behavior.

The duration of stalking and frequency of associated violence was the same between male and female stalkers. However, there were two main differences between the groups: the nature of the relationship with the victim and the methods of harassment. First, female stalkers were more likely to target someone they already knew but weren’t in an intimate relationship with- usually a professional contact such as a therapist or doctor, as the care from these individuals could be misconstrued as romantic interest. Males, on the other hand, tended to target strangers or previous intimate partners. The authors concluded that females want to establish intimacy with the victim while males want to maintain it. One possible reason for this difference is that females in general will pursue potential romantic partners longer than males will, and stalking is when this pursuit goes to the extreme. Males don’t invest the time into the pursuit and will often move on and find someone else (so the pursuit can’t be taken to an extreme if it never really begins), but perhaps once they start a relationship with an individual there is more incentive to make it last, hence the stalking of an ex-romantic partner.

Second, in terms of methods males tended to follow their victims more, while females preferred telephone calls. However, there were overall all no significant differences in the propensity for the stalkers to threaten or attack their victims. The researchers did find that male stalkers are more likely to move from verbal threats to actual physical assault, but this difference could simply due to the fact that males have more chances to physically attack their victim as they are following them, while females can harass their victims from a distant location through the phone. I don’t know if this is true for adult men, but teenage males tend to take more risks and be more impulsive than females, and it is much riskier to follow a victim than it is to simply call them.


The second article (Meloy & Fisher, 2005) discussed the neurobiology of stalking, but it wasn’t an actual empirical study. Perhaps I’m being too critical, but I would imagine that if one wanted to determine the neurological correlates of stalking, he or she would perform some sort of neuroimaging study with a sample of stalkers who were referred to a forensic mental health clinic, akin to the sample in the first study. However, for some reason perhaps due to lack of resources or time, the researchers did not do this. Instead, they simply assumed that the neurological mechanisms involved in early-stage intense romantic love would be the same ones that are involved in stalking. I can see why this might be the case as both stalkers and individuals experiencing early-stage intense romantic love become infatuated with and obsessively think about the person they so desire, but the fact that early-stage romantic lovers AREN’T stalkers shouldn’t be ignored. Perhaps one could argue that the only reason early-stage intense romantic lovers aren’t considered stalkers is because the object of their affection returns their feelings, but even when they are rejected by/break up with the person they love these individuals don’t subsequently assume stalking behavior. There is something “special” about stalkers that makes them overly obsessed with an individual without due cause and/or unable to cope with being rejected by a former/potential intimate.

I suppose I can’t be too harsh, though, as the article only claims to be, “Some thoughts on the neurobiology of stalking”. It never declares to have found out any answers, but it does offer hypotheses. Of course, I had to wait until the very last page for these hypotheses, so until then I was just angry at the article for not giving me the information I wanted. They first covered the same changes in neurological activity during early-stage intense romantic love we discussed last Monday: increased activity in the VTA and caudate nucleus, increased dopamine, and decreased serotonin- the former three being related to reward-seeking behavior and the latter related to obsessive thinking. It does make a lot of sense that these same changes would (and probably do) occur in stalkers. But what are the abnormal biological or developmental issues that result in stalking behavior? Could it be that these neurological changes are brought to an extreme and/or that they don’t back to normal after being rejected? The authors offer some interesting hypotheses:

1.) Stalkers may have a different ratio between activities of central dopamine and serotonin, which could result in more tenacious reward-seeking and obsessive behavior than normal.
2.) Past research has found that stalkers have insecure attachments, so the authors suggest that the oxytocin and vasopressin levels in female and male stalkers may be lower and should be examined, as these hormones are related to bonding behaviors.
3.) There might be some link between stalking and impulse control. If this is the case then it would make sense if teenagers more frequently engaged in stalking behavior, but the first study I read said that the mean age of male and female stalkers was about 37 years, so there must be more involved than just a lack of impulse control.

The article was published in 2005 and to my knowledge is the most recent information on the neurobiology of stalking. I hope that at least some research has been done in the past six years, though, as there is still much to be discovered. As we mentioned in class, it would be interesting to see if there are any neurological differences between male and female stalkers, but I think the neurobiology of stalking in general needs to be further researched first.


AND ALSO.....


Six basic types of stalking have been identified (Mullen et al 2006). 1) Rejected stalkers usually commence stalking after the breakdown of an intimate (usually sexual) romantic relationship. Their motives alternate between a desire for reconciliation and wanting revenge. 2) Intimacy seekers seek a relationship with someone who they love and are convinced returns their feelings. This is the category of perpetrators who on average stalk for the longest period of time, and into which the majority of female stalkers fall. 3) The incompetent stalker also seeks intimacy, but instead of a relationship they usually seek a single date or sexual encounter. A lot of the socially incompetent fall into this category, and their behavior is categorized by feeling entitled to a relationship while being indifferent to the feelings of their victim. 4) The resentful stalker wants to frighten their victim or exact revenge for a real or imagined slight, and get satisfaction from feelings of power and control over their victim. These stalkers frequently threaten their victims, but are the least likely of all the groups to physically attack them. Finally 6) predatory stalkers pursue their victim with the intention of assaulting them, usually sexually.

Predatory stalkers stalk for the shortest period of time, but have the highest incident of committing assault, while resentful and intimacy seeking stalkers stalk for much longer periods of time, but have the lowest incident of assault. Stalking has been found to be the most psychologically damaging to the victim when the stalker is an ex-partner, probably because in those cases the stalker knows more about the victim and how best to frighten them (McEwan et al 2009).

The Purcell et al article was really interesting because the results demonstrated that stalking by juveniles is correlated with a higher incidence of violent assaults than stalking by adults. The majority of perpetrators in the study were male (mean age 15.4 years), the majority of victims were female (mean age 18.8 years), and most victims knew the perpetrator. Interestingly, 57% of the cases involved same gender stalking, with females being more likely than males to stalk someone of the same gender. Females were also more likely to enlist the help of other people in stalking their target.

Among juveniles the most common cause of stalking was as a continuation of bullying, and males and females perpetrated this type of stalking equally, as they did with the next most common motive for stalking, retaliation for a perceived slight. The gender similarities end here. Males were more likely to be perpetrators and females victims in all other stalking categories - rejected stalking following the termination of a romantic relationship, predatory stalking, stalking by the psychologically disturbed, and, unlike what was found in the Mullen and McEwan studies, in intimacy seeking stalking. It should be noted that the intimacy seeking group was small (n=6), but like the intimacy seeking adults, they stalked for the longest continuous periods of time. Overall, there was a higher incidence of physical assault among juvenile stalkers than among the adult populations studied in the other papers, even though the populations studied in the McEwan study were stalkers who had been referred to a forensic mental health clinic, suggesting a more psychologically disturbed population than the juveniles studied in Purcell's paper. In fact, only 8 (out of 299) of the juvenile stalkers in Purcell's study had been diagnosed with a mental illness (though the possibility of mental illness was suggested for a significant minority).

All of these studies, Purcell's especially, seem to reaffirm my idea that males stalk people to exert power and control over their victim, or to harass someone who rejected them romantically, more often than females do. It is interesting to note that a majority of the intimacy seeking stalkers (again, most of the females were in this category) in McEwan's study were diagnosed with a mental illness, and also that they did not express a desire to harm their victim. It was only in the juvenile study that some females reported a desire to harm their victim, and their victims were usually other girls. It would be interested to look at stalking among the mean girls and boys population, no? But anyway, I'm sensing from what I'm reading that while both genders may stalk in equal numbers, it is overwhelmingly men who stalk with the purpose of frightening or harming their victim, except in juveniles. I'd love to see if Purcell's results could be replicated, because they raise the question of what happens to girls as they grow up. The incidence of males stalking females seemingly doesn't decrease from adolescence to adulthood, but the incidence of females stalking people in order to scare or hurt them goes way down (and I think is higher among teens than a lot of people realize). Do girls really just grow out of it? Are they socialized out of it? Do they have less of a need to soothe their egos by hurting people they perceive to have slighted them, and if so, why? I'd also like to look exclusively at female stalkers, and see what percentage of them have been diagnosed with a mental illness, and if it's higher than the percentage of male stalkers who have a diagnosable mental illness. Above all I think way more research needs to be done on juvenile stalking, because I'm sure it's more prevalent and more harmful than people realize.