1 In 12 Women Have Been Stalked Study Says Stalkers Pursue 1 Million Women Every Year
One in 12 American women are stalked at least once, and stalkers pursue or harass an estimated 1 million women every year, the Justice Department said Thursday in a report of survey results to Congress.
The telephone survey contacted 8,000 women and 8,000 men. The result, Attorney General Janet Reno said in a statement, “indicates that stalking is a bigger problem than we previously thought.”
“Stalking is an act of terror that builds a prison of fear around its victims,” Reno said.
The study by the National Institute of Justice found “strong evidence of a link between stalking and domestic violence.”
Of the female victims, 59 percent said their stalkers were either husbands, boyfriends or people they had lived with. Eighty percent of these women reported they were assaulted by the stalker, the study said. Stalking was defined by researchers as “a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated physical or visual proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written or implied threats.”
Typical stalking behavior involves lying in wait, telephone harassment or vandalism.
The study found that 8.1 percent of women surveyed and 2.2 percent of men reported that they had been stalked at least once. Using Census data, researchers estimated that one in 12 American women - 8.2 million - and one in 45 men - 2 million - are stalked at least once.
Researchers also found that 1 percent of women participating in the study reported being stalked in the 12 months preceding the survey conducted from November 1995 through May 1996. In the overall population, researchers estimated that 1,006,970 women are stalked each year.
By comparison, four men per 1,000 reported being stalked in the previous year, equating to an estimated 370,992 among the population of adult American males.
Annual rates of stalking are higher than the lifetime estimates because victims are usually between the ages of 19 and 39 and typically are stalked repeatedly. “Some men and women are stalked for years,” the report said.
Women were four times more likely to be stalked than men, the survey found. The study found 651 stalking victims identified by the survey were women, compared to 159 men.
Most stalkings of both men and women involve perpetrators who know their victims. The survey found that 23 percent of female victims and 36 percent of male victims reported they were stalked by strangers.
Only 30 percent of men reported they were stalked by current or former wives, girlfriends, dates or people they had lived with.
California passed the first anti-stalking criminal statute in 1990, and all 50 states have tightened laws to make stalking a criminal act.
Yet only half the victims in the study said they reported the episodes to police. Of women who obtained restraining orders against stalkers, 80 percent reported that these decrees were violated.