Stalking Acknowledgement and Reporting Among College Women Experiencing Intrusive Behaviors: Implications for the Emergence of a "Classic Stalking Case"

• NCJ Number: 220347
• Journal: Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 35 Issue: 5 Dated: September/October 2007 Pages: 556-569
• Author(s): Carol E. Jordan; Pamela Wilcox; Adam J. Pritchard
• Date Published: September 2007
• Length: 14 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examined the correlates of stalking acknowledgement and reporting the role that victim level of fear, type of intrusive behavior involved; relationship of perpetrator to the victim; and victim experiences with other types of violent physical and sexual victimization have on women’s defining of intrusive behavior as “stalking victimization”, and how college women reported their experiences to police.

Abstract

Analyzed results indicated that fear, type of stalking, and perpetrator relationship were related to whether the victim reported the incident to the police, regardless of whether the victim acknowledged that the behavior reported was stalking. Less than half of the subjects (42.1 percent) categorized as victims of stalking-related behaviors, acknowledged these events as stalking; 11.1 percent reported that they “didn’t know” if these events constituted stalking. High levels of fear and experience with multiple stalking incidents were more often present among those who self-acknowledged their experiences as “stalking” versus those who did not. There was a moderate tendency for women stalked by an intimate partner to self-acknowledge stalking in comparison to individuals not stalked by an intimate. Likelihood of acknowledgement was higher among those experiencing other types of victimization along with the stalking, in comparison to women not experiencing co-victimization. About one in six (18.7 percent) victims indicated that the incident reported on the survey was also reported to police (57.6 percent reported to local police, 30.3 percent reported to campus police, and the remainder to other police departments where the incident occurred). Most often the victim reported the incident. For incidents not reported by the victim, friends or family members reported the incident in 75 percent of the cases. This study was limited by a small sample at one large public university experiencing a set of behaviors that may or may not have met the legal definition of criminal stalking, and used a limited set of correlates to understand the after-the-crime decisionmaking of stalking-related victims. Future studies should strive to develop more comprehensive models of acknowledgement and reporting among victims of stalking-related behaviors in order to better understand the acknowledgement-reporting linkage for this type of victimization. Tables, notes, and references