Stalking

History of the Issue

Stalking emerged as a crime in the early 1990s. The behaviors that are now called stalking, however, have much longer histories, and they were assigned different names in the past. For example, in 1921, psychiatrists first identified “erotomania,” the delusion of being loved by someone, often a prominent or even famous person; erotomanics, who were usually women, often followed the person who was the focus of their delusion. More recently, journalists described “obsession” and “psychological rape” as problems in relationships, rather than as evidence of mental illness or as crimes. In the late 1980s, several well-publicized incidents of celebrities being harassed by fans led the press to begin speaking of “star stalking”; these cases could involve serious crimes, as in 1989, when television actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by a fan. Several of these cases involved the harassment of celebrities in California, and the entertainment industry began to press for criminal penalties for star stalking in that state.

Activists in the movement against domestic violence and battering soon linked their cause to the concern over star stalking. They argued that women seeking to leave abusive relationships often sought restraining orders (a court order forbidding an individual to approach or bother the person requesting protection) against their former partners; but, these activists noted, these orders frequently were violated, leading in some cases to the woman's death. They suggested that star stalking was just one form of a much larger problem, and that the typical stalking victim was a women trying to leave an unsatisfactory, often abusive, relationship. In 1990, California passed the nation's first antistalking law.

Other states quickly followed; by 1993, forty-eight states and the District of Columbia had criminalized stalking. Early estimates—not based on any empirical research—suggested that there might be as many as 200,000 stalking cases per year. Earlier discussions of erotomania and star stalking had depicted offenders as both male and female, but generally of lower status than their victims; claims about stalking, however, argued that, in most cases, men stalked women, and that stalking was a form of male domination in a patriarchal society. While the earlier characterizations of the problem had suggested that violent outcomes were rare, claims about stalking highlighted cases of serious, even fatal, violence.

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