Lorraine Sheridan is an author of several books and more than 50 articles on the topic of stalking. Now the Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Curtin University and her colleagues are conducting research on stalking within the LGBTIQ community.

The team are looking into the types of harassment behaviours that people judge to be unacceptable and acceptable.  

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The study will compare the experiences of people in the LGBTIQ community with those of people in wider society and their looking for people to take part in the research.

Dr Sherdian spoke to Graeme Watson on RTRFM’s program ‘All Things Queer‘ earlier this week.

How do you define what stalking is?

That’s a really big question. I did a PhD on stalking nearly 20 years ago, that makes me feel old, but I think my first ten studies were on how to define stalking. It’s really difficult compared to other crimes, because your average stalking case is about two years.

It’s not a quick thing like a robbery or a sexual assault. Stalking goes on and on and it’s often lots of little things put together. So we tend to look at it in the ‘eye of the beholder’ that somebody feels like they are being harassed, it feels like things are out of control, somebody’s not being treated appropriately – we tend to say it’s stalking. Anything can constitute stalking, sending somebody texts, walking past their house, asking questions about them, right up to rape and murder.

It’s quite a big spectrum that we’re talking about isn’t it?

It’s a really big spectrum. Half of all stalkers will have had a romantic relationship with their victim as well, so it cuts across domestic abuse issues. You can have stranger stalkers, you can have mentally ill stalkers, you can have stalkers who generally want to have a relationship but don’t have the social skills – so they’re not actually very harmful but they may appear harmful. It’s actually really really difficult to identify stalking.

Is it a modern phenomenon or is it something we’ve always had?

It’s always been there, funnily enough we got a law against it 15-20 years ago,  ancient Rome had a law against it, it’s mentioned in Shakespeare’s dark sonnets,  its always been around.

I guess on of the more common things we hear about is cyber stalking, stalking happening through the online world.  Where do we draw the line, if I’m looking a someone’s Facebook page too often – when do we move into the world of stalking?

It’s when it’s taken your life over as well. As the actual stalker, when you’re feeling consumed and that you can’t really operate without looking at this person, without following this person, without finding something new about this person, without monitoring this person.  When it starts to consume you, as well as affecting the victim, then you’ve got a problem.

You and your colleagues are about to look into stalking in the LGBTIQ community, what do we know about stalking in our community?

Amazingly very little, we’re hardly talking about a very small minority group, but there have actually been no studies about harassment in the community, and there is over a thousand studies now in general stalking. So we thought it was high time, just in case there are any kind of special needs for the LGBTIQ community; there may or may not be.

I did some research on male rape, particularly in the queer community, about twenty years ago in England. We found there that there were some special needs. I just wondered if there were any here, and if we find a need, we can feed that back into service providers.

We do hear a lot of anecdotal stories, we hear people say ‘My stalker’s back’, is there anecdotal evidence to warrant this new research?

Yes, there’s lots of story evidence on social media, more scientifically we do know that about one in four or five women will be stalked in their lifetime, and about one in twenty men. But of the men, they are more likely to be stalked by other men. Women are more likely to be stalked by men. What we don’t know is anything about their former relationship. We don’t know if it started as romantic or if it’s homophobic. We don;t know where it comes from, and that’s what we’d really like to know. We don’t know anything about the trans or intersex communities at all.

When we talk about stalking it’s often linked to violence, or escalates to violence. Are their key things that let us know when that behaviour is moving in that direction?

The people who are most likely to be violent, the stalker’s most likely to be violent, not exclusively, but they are normally the people that the victim has had a relationship with. Usually you will see trigger and warning signs. We’ll see close monitoring while the relationship was intact and we will see basically jealousy signs.

But these are the times of cases where people will say ‘Oh, your so lucky to have that kind of attention, wish I had that kind of attention,” because stalkers are often very attractive, well educated with a high economic social status. They’re not like normal criminals. These are the cases that are most likely to resolve in murder.

High status, decent individuals, stalking an ex, they’re the ones most likely to lead to the death of the victim.

If someone feels  that they are being stalked, what should they do? What actions should you take?

Record everything, no matter how innocuous it seems, because sometimes you can have a bit of a job convincing the authorities that this is a serious incident. You have demonstrate that lots of little things are adding up. Sometimes two plus two, plus two, plus two, ends up at one hundred and two. You’ve got to demonstrate these things adding up. You have to re-create a course of conduct that would give a reasonable person fear and then get straight to the police and keep recording, recording recording!

Keep stuff that you’re being sent, no matter how horrible or distasteful it may be. Keep a hold of it, keep a record always.

How can people get involved in your research?

We’ve got a questionnaire online, so it doesn’t cost people anything to come and see us, you can do it in the privacy of your own home.  We’re looking at people’s experiences, but also what they think of various harassing behaviours. We’re interested in what people think is acceptable. We’re doing it in twelve different countries as well.

We’re already seeing that the experiences that people have are quite similar and are pretty constant between countries. We’ve had results from Egypt, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Finland, Japan, Indonesia and Italy. The experiences are pretty constant between countries but people’s judgments about what is acceptable vary radically.

You find in countries where it’s a lot more normal, particularly for women, to be routinely sexually assaulted – or treated in a submissive manner – these countries tend to be more accepting of the behavior.

Click here to take part in the survey.

The survey is open to everyone and takes betweem 10-15 minutes to complete.

Image: Stock Image YayMicro- Creatista