Introduction

The various metamorphoses experienced by the meaning attached to stalking were described in Chapter 1. Understandably, the potential prevalence and nature of stalking shifted dramatically as the definitional constraints on the behaviour changed. The prevalence of stalking differs according to whether we confine its use to the pursuit of the famous, the harassing of women, the obsessive following of others or, finally, to the specific patterns of repeatedly intrusive behaviour that occasion fear. The changing constructions throw up different typifying instances with different propositions about what constitutes stalking and what are its likely implications. The stalking of Rebecca Schaeffer was the paradigm case of ‘star stalking’. The construction of stalking within a domestic violence paradigm offered equally frightening defining instances in, for example, the killing of American Kristin Lardner by her ex-boyfriend (Lardner, 1995) and the understandably extensively reported pursuit of Joy Silverman by her ex-lover, Chief Judge Sol Wachtler in the USA (see Gross, 1994; Kurt, 1995).

As the net represented by stalking widens to catch an ever larger range of behaviours and perpetrators, there has not always been an appropriate shift in the image conjured up by the label stalking. When the lifetime prevalence of stalking was reported to be between 8% and 12% for women in the USA (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998), the image conjured up for many was of vast numbers of women living in fear for their lives and at the mercy of potential killers.