Stalkers. Jean Ritchie
and the threat to take other lives, particularly that of their victim. Often the fantasies get sicker, more sordid and more frightening as the condition progresses.
‘The people who suffer from obsession are usually rather pathetic, unsuccessful at sexual relations. The obsession feeds their imagination. Anyone in the public eye can be selected as a target, but not only celebrities are at risk. Anyone thought of as a superior could be a victim: women could fall for their GP, priest or bank manager, men with a work colleague, a barmaid or the girl next door. There are quite a few cases in Broadmoor of patients who are dangerously in love with ordinary people.
‘Obsession and stalking can be separate, although they are close. Obsession is a very intense feeling of acute need. There is a childish level of demand for another person, a wave of inner desperation and desolation that makes the sufferer want to own the victim. Obsession affects more men than women. It can be biological, or the result of childhood traumas or problems. The difficulty with knowing whether obsessive love is dangerous is that a lot of people have suffered some form of it: the pangs of despised love, as Hamlet called it, are familiar enough. In some ways it is just an extreme of an emotion we all possess: arguably some of the greatest love affairs are obsessive, frantic and jealous. But the need to know everything about a new partner is not normal, not just an extension of passion: it is a mental disorder.
‘Stalking is often just seeing someone out of reach. Becoming fixated on a stranger is a useful way of avoiding reality – there is less chance of the fantasy being broken. It is a personality disorder, and you only really hear about it when it comes to court: at the lower levels the stalker is merely infatuated, and unless their behaviour presents a real threat to the person they love it does not come to public notice. Many do not even want to make direct contact with their love object, but some do. The sufferer will build up a fantasy world around the person and follow them to find out every detail of their lives. At first the stalker may send polite notes and flowers to try to attract their victim’s attention, but as these are ignored the stalker becomes gradually more angry. The tone of the notes becomes abusive, showing the signs of frustration that lead to aggression.
‘If the love is unrequited, the love turns to hate. Two sides of the same coin. Love letters turn into hate mail, often accompanied by horrendous threats, although these are usually only an attempt to gain attention. To many sufferers from obsessional love, the love is the peak experience of their lives. It is the only time they have fallen in love, it comes like a bolt from the blue. Often the sufferer believes obsessive behaviour is simply a way of getting through to someone, with the rationale that anyone can have anything if they try hard enough.
‘Harmless fantasy can easily turn into dangerous obsession, especially if the sufferer is a lonely person with a vivid imagination. If a man is strongly attracted to a woman he can become wildly jealous. To him she is coming and going as she pleases and yet he thinks she is his. But she doesn’t even know he exists. He feels constantly rejected and you get dysfunctional attempts at taking control of her life.’
Dr Nias confirms that there is no single effective cure. Some sufferers from obsessional love do recover spontaneously, but for many it takes twenty or more years to loosen the grip of an obsession.
‘For many it is merely a part of another disorder. The textbooks say there is no known cause and no known cure. There has been little research into this specific area, but there is also no real cure for a lot of mental disorders. Doctors may try a form of therapy which attempts to change the way in which the sufferer thinks, but many sufferers do not accept or admit that there is a problem. To them, it is obvious that the victim loves them. They are confident that in time the object of their desire will come around and accept them.
‘The law, police, court, prison have no effect. Love will conquer all. A prison sentence is useless, and a stay in a secure hospital is no better, apart from the fact that we can make the victim feel safer when the persecutor is locked up. Tragically, some victims will know no respite, because the stalker’s obsession will be lifelong and unshakeable. Unless he switches his allegiance to a new target, they will remain in the frame. Sometimes a doctor takes the place of the original victim, and they may be able to cope better, but they face the same problems. It is more than an occupational hazard, it is something a doctor dreads. A second obsession is no less binding than a first.’
The life sentence for the victim is a prognosis also given by Professor David Allen, a clinical psychologist based in Paris: ‘Being a stalking victim can be a death sentence – it is certainly a life sentence, spent looking over the shoulders. There is no cure. In extreme cases it can lead to murder, although that is very rare. For the sufferer, there is an absolute conviction that they are loved: every word, every gesture, every facial tic is interpreted as evidence of that. A simple “See you tomorrow” takes on huge significance in their minds.’
Professor Allen’s wife Michelle is a leading French psychoanalyst who has dealt professionally with stalkers and obsessives: ‘I can listen to women and men who are in the grip of an obsession with another person and I can offer them analysis and they can go into therapy, which may contain and control them, but it will not cure them. They may drop their object of desire but latch on to someone else, another victim. Nothing will shake their self-belief. There is no division between fantasy and reality. In extreme cases, life and death become blurred, too, and they become a danger, a walking time bomb.’
More studies of stalking and stalkers have been done in America than anywhere else because stalking has been accepted as a crime in the States since 1990, when California pioneered the first anti-stalking laws through its state legislature (fuelled by the enormous problems the Hollywood stars were experiencing). Since then every other state has followed suit, which makes it possible to determine and examine a specific group of people who have been found guilty of stalking offences. In Britain, some stalkers are pursued under civil law, some under criminal law, and many not at all (see ‘A Paper Shield’, pp. 319—37).
‘Most stalkers are men, and they come in all ages and from all ethnic backgrounds, and from varied social and family backgrounds,’ says Houston forensic psychologist Jerome Brown. ‘Many are relatively intelligent men with a history of inept inadequate heterosexual relationships. They are motivated by fantasies of romantic involvement with their victims, but they have no idea what ‘love’ really means. To many of them, love equals possession. At first, they usually don’t want to hurt their victims, just possess them. The thrill of the chase increases the satisfaction they feel upon “obtaining” them. They’re not able to see the person of their obsession as a real person. When the “thing” does not respond to them properly, they’re likely to get angry at it.’
Stanton Samenow, an American psychologist and author of a book called Inside the Criminal Mind says stalkers vacillate between considering themselves ‘No. 1’ and ‘nothing’.
‘The stalking is the tip of the iceberg. The stalking props up their self-esteem,’ he says. When the stalker is rejected he suffers a huge blow to his feeling of self-worth, and this, coupled with the realization that he is not going to be able to have what he wants, leads to violence.
The predominance of men among stalkers is borne out by British Telecom statistics, which show that twice as many malicious calls are made by men than by women. The only other measure of the gender profile of the British stalker is anecdotal: four out of every five cases that are reported in a newspaper involve a man stalking a woman. It could be that these receive more publicity – women are more likely to look to the police and the courts for help, and the presence of a physically powerful male stalker may actually be more threatening than the continued attentions of a female one. But, even allowing for this distortion, it is likely that we follow the American pattern and have a much higher number of males stalking females than the other way round.
‘Women who are rejected may act destructively towards themselves, or turn to others for nurturing to get over the rejection. Men use aggression to restore the equilibrium of their self-esteem,’ says New York forensic psychologist Dr James Wulach.
Almost all stalking has an underlying sexual motive, although there are cases where the stalker is simply trying to get into the victim’s life for other reasons, usually associated with feelings of prestige and