Effects of and coping strategies for stalking victimisation: Consequences for its criminalization

Abstract

A well-developed understanding of how stalking affects victims and of the coping strategies they use can be useful in the current context of its incrimination in several western European countries. To explore these themes a study was conducted with a subsample of 152 young adult victims obtained from a sample of 1162 Spanish university students. The current study examines the psychological consequences of stalking behaviours for victims and the strategies they used to stop stalking. These findings show that the most prevalent emotional responses in victims, strongly influenced by the previous victim-offender relationship, were anger (71.1%), annoyance (71.1%) and fear (51.3%). The majority of self-identified victims had also experienced some sort of adverse psychological consequence (81.6%), albeit of lower intensity and significantly related to the victim's sex. Besides, virtually all the victims (97.4%) took some coping measures, although reporting the incident was not usual, as only 19.1% of the cases of stalking were brought to the attention of the police.

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under the R&D project ‘Contemporary forms of gender-based violence: legal mechanisms for protecting victims’ (DER2015-64506-C2-1-R).