Stalking Awareness
January is National Stalking Awareness Month. According to The Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center (SPARC), Stalking is a serious, prevalent, and dangerous crime that impacts every community in the United States.
While awareness and public discussion of intimate partner violence and sexual assault have increased in recent years, stalking remains frequently misunderstood and rarely discussed – both within the fields of domestic and sexual violence and among the broader general public.
It is essential for victims, survivors, service providers, and the criminal justice system to be able to identify and name stalking. Stalking is a unique crime that calls for particularized safety planning, investigation, charging, and prosecution, as well as the development and implementation of policies and protocols to ensure an effective response. For victims, it can be very empowering to accurately name their experiences as “stalking;” it enables them to make sense of what they are going through and helps them identify and seek appropriate help and resources.
A collective community response is required to end stalking. Friends and family members are usually the first people a stalking victim talks to about what’s going on and their responses heavily influence whether or not a victim seeks further help. When friends, family, neighbors, teachers, mentors, and colleagues know how to identify stalking, they are better able to support victims and help keep them safe.
Dating abuse and/or sexual assault educators have an incredible opportunity to increase knowledge about this commonly co-occurring crime. With this guide and the referenced materials, SPARC hopes to assist educators in their essential work to raise awareness of stalking.
What is stalking?
Stalking is generally defined as a pattern of behavior targeted at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to feel fear. Fear is central to the definition of stalking. Common stalking behaviors include (but are not limited to) following, repeated contact, surveillance, spreading rumors, and threats.
Recognize that stalking…
Consider the behaviors and examples that you already use in your workshops to illustrate inter-personal violence – it’s very likely that you’re already talking about stalking! Simply explaining that “X behavior is also an example of stalking, a prevalent crime that may co-occur with dating violence/sexual assault” can be a major step in helping victims identify their experiences and seek more information.
More specific suggestions are below. If your organization provides information on sexual assault, intimate partner violence, harassment in the workplace, elder abuse, child abuse, and/or a variety of other issues, stalking is relevant to your topic. Adding some statistics and/ or examples about the intersection of stalking with your main topic can be an easy and time-efficient way to incorporate stalking into your educational efforts.
Videos
Resources
From StalkingAwareness.org:
From NCTC: