Life for a woman being stalked can be a hell that’s hard for others to fathom.

"It's like walking a tightrope held by an enemy over an abyss toward an unseen danger on the other end," says Jennifer Dunn, an assistant professor of sociology.

The unseen danger? No matter how this woman deals with the stalker or the legal system, it's likely to be a misstep. 

"Any compliance with the stalker's demands—even when done out of absolute terror—tends to make victims look as if they're not setting clear boundaries, as if they're participants in precipitating the violence," says Dunn, whose new book, Courting Disaster: Intimate Stalking, Culture, and Criminal Justice, takes an in-depth look at stalking and its aftermath.

"But if the victims get frustrated, fed up, and angry, and they fight back, that comes back to haunt them, too. To be a 'good' victim in a stalking case, you have to present yourself as being afraid. Both compliance and resistance violate expectations of what victims are supposed to be like."

In TV and film, stalkers tend to be obsessed psychopaths who encounter their victims by chance. In reality, stalkers are usually abusive husbands and boyfriends whom victims have managed to leave.

"These are men with whom the victims have had a relationship, people they have cared about, and it's confusing because many stalkers aren't just being threatening and violent—they're also showering victims with love letters and cards and flowers," Dunn says.

She did a variety of research to understand the experience of "intimate stalking"—being stalked by someone you were once close to—and the social and legal dilemmas these victims face. 

She spent two years in the domestic violence unit of a prosecutor’s office in a large Western city, where she reviewed all the felony case files that carried a stalking charge. Using those files, she created a database that included information on stalking behaviors reported by the victims, victims' responses, the disposition of the cases, and other information. She also observed trials, sat in on a stalking survivors’ support group, did in-depth interviews with stalking victims, and talked to prosecutors and victims’ advocates.

Dunn didn’t set out to exclude female stalkers from her study, but it turned out that way. All of the 130 files she was able to retrieve from the prosecutor’s office involved female victims and male stalkers. (She had chosen felony cases because it gave her a larger sample: the prosecutor’s office kept misdemeanor case files for a much shorter time.)

As she notes in her book, the National Violence Against Women survey (1998) found that more than 1 million women are stalked each year in the United States; 80 percent of stalking victims are women; and 87 percent of stalkers are men. 

Dunn became interested in the topic of stalking in the mid-1990s after reading a magazine article about it. "Stalking was just coming to the attention of the public—just becoming ‘constructed’ as a social problem," she says. "It struck me that it was a very patterned behavior—that stalkers were using symbols of courtship but taking them to extremes and twisting them."

Hence the title of her book, Courting Disaster. "Stalking—and [women’s] response to it—fits into a cultural framework that has to do with our traditional constructions of courtship and romance," she says.

As part of her study, Dunn looked at how romantic love and courtship is portrayed in movies that young people were likely to see. The message in those films? Even if they don’t get along in the beginning, the boy will win the girl if he’s persistent enough.

Even our fairy tales encourage men not to give up the pursuit, Dunn points out.

"We teach girls that to be ardently pursued is to be desirable, we teach boys that if they want a woman, they must triumph over every obstacle in the way, and we call all this romance. We confuse jealousy with true love."

Not surprisingly, these cultural views of romance influence women’s feelings about stalking behavior, she says.

"I surveyed sorority women as part of the research I did for the book. The survey included a situation where a woman says, 'No, I don't want to see you any more,' but the man leaves flowers at the door, calls, writes, begs, pleads—and the women surveyed thought these things were romantic. They would be annoyed and even frightened but flattered at the same time.

"There's ambivalence when stalking is cloaked in romantic imagery, which is why women are so susceptible to it."

When the stalker is a former partner, the victim is more likely to feel confused and have mixed feelings, Dunn’s research showed. Those feelings "sometimes led them to do things that would come back to haunt them later, like opening the door to the stalker or agreeing to meet him somewhere," she says. 

Defense attorneys seize on such instances to try to discredit the victim, Dunn says. As her research progressed, its central concern became the prosecution of these cases from the victims’ perspective. The legal process can be as harrowing as the stalking itself, she found.

"A lot of the ideological baggage that gets attached to domestic violence gets attached here, too," she says.
 "You have skeptical police officers, prosecutors who don't believe the women have really left [the men who are stalking them], defense attorneys who will try to claim that it's not really stalking because it involves intimates—even family and friends will ask, 'What did you do to bring this on yourself?'

"Prosecutors, who are mainly interested in convictability, know that judges and juries tend to be critical of this type of victim. It can be incredibly frustrating.

"Some savvy women become skilled at negotiating these barriers and figure out how to work within the system to get the help they're looking for, but I think that's the exception rather than the rule. One woman told me that testifying in court was the worst experience of her life."

Although Courting Disaster was published by Aldine de Gruyter, an academic press, as one volume in a series on social problems and issues, Dunn hopes it will be a useful resource for women being stalked, their counselors, and their families.

"The book lays out all the ways the victim makes the wrong move—you could almost look at it as a guidebook for successfully negotiating the criminal justice system," she says.

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