Young people may not even realise they have been victims of stalking, the Crown Prosecution Service has said as it launched a scheme to tackle a rise in offending.
The number of stalking offences charged by the CPS in England and Wales reached a record high last year of 7,168. More than 80% of these were flagged as relating to domestic abuse, meaning most victims were stalked or harassed by someone they knew.
Part of the four-year stalking action plan included exploring how a “specific policy statement” for children and young people could help them recognise the behaviours they encountered or displayed, because many may not be familiar with what constitutes stalking.
“Young people are growing up in this digital world, so they’ve got more access to both friends and strangers than any other generation has before,” said Olivia Rose, the CPS’s national stalking lead. “And what might seem quite innocent at first can then escalate into stalking.
“Sometimes victims, and offenders, are unclear about what those boundaries are and when they’re crossed from. Some people might not recognise when they’ve been a victim of stalking,” she added, “but equally, sometimes an offender may not obviously understand, and be able to spot when their own behaviour has crossed that line into criminality.”
Rose said it was important to educate victims to spot the signs and report stalking to the police, but also to educate younger offenders to understand when their behaviour was escalating into stalking.
Lisa (not her real name) met her partner when she was 15, and they were together for two decades. After she left him, he started stalking her.
He would turn up at the family home, and bombard her with emails, calls and messages throughout the day and night. He tried to hack into her email account, set up fake social media profiles to contact her, and even accessed their child’s Facebook account to view her social media posts.
Lisa was eventually locked out of the email account she had had since she was 12, which she said “sounds such a small thing but it was quite a big thing for me” and was “quite gutting”, because she had “emails on there from my nan who had passed away”.
“I had dating profiles set up in my name [by him],” she said. “He put me on swingers’ websites, you name it, he put me on it, and he put my phone number on there, so I’d wake up in the morning, and I would be greeted with videos and pictures that I’d never wanted to see in all my life.
“I was extremely suicidal because I just felt like the only way of being able to escape him and be free from him would be to end my life,” she said. “I just literally felt absolutely petrified to be in my own home. I didn’t feel safe to be in my home at all. And it just left me extremely suicidal.”
Her stalker was eventually jailed for two years and eight months. However, the stalking had had such an impact on her life, she said, that she still had nightmares and flashbacks, and never wants to be in another romantic relationship. She spends her “whole life looking around” because she is “scared that somebody is going to be following me”.
“The whole thing has moulded me,” she said. “For half of my life, I’ve been in this relationship, and it hasn’t been nice from the get-go.
“I couldn’t think of anything worse than to be in a relationship,” she added, “because I don’t ever want to run a chance of being with somebody like him, or to end a relationship and it not be ended.”
The conviction and jailing of her stalker was “massively, hugely” important. When she heard, she said, she broke down in tears, “because it meant the whole world and more”.
“Just to know that he hadn’t got away with it again, and that there was some sort of justice there,” she said. “I didn’t think I was going to get any justice for myself at all.”
Rose said offenders were using technologyto stalk, monitor and control their victims.
As well as social media and messaging apps, perpetrators were using GPS trackers, banking apps, and shopping and reselling apps. The CPS was working with tech experts “to spot and tackle those digital stalking patterns”, Rose said.
“We’re really trying to get ahead of the curve,” she added. “We’re really fighting to understand, well, actually, if they’re doing this, what could follow?
“So that’s why it’s really important for us within the stalking action plan that we’ve got those experts on board,” she said, “because we are not experts.”
Other measures in the plan include working with police to ensure officers and prosecutors can spot the patterns of control and trauma response that underpin stalking, and improving transparency through the introduction of stalking-specific data flagging.
“That’s how we’ve been able to identify that the number of cases prosecuted had increased year-on-year,” Rose said.
“That’s something that the charities really wanted us to have, and we just weren’t able to give them that sort of detailed information, which we can now.”
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