Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2003 Apr;4(2):148-62.
doi: 10.1177/1524838002250766.

Stalking: knowns and unknowns

Lorraine P Sheridan  1 , Eric Blaauw, Graham M Davies
Affiliations
Review

Stalking: knowns and unknowns

Lorraine P Sheridan et al. Trauma Violence Abuse. 2003 Apr.

Abstract

The current work reviews literature on the nature of stalking. Despite its nebulous nature and differing legal and clinical definitions of stalking, researchers and practitioners are referring to the same phenomenon. Stalking is chronic, consisting of a number of nuisance behaviors that appear consistent over countries and samples. Different categorizations of stalkers and their victims exist, but ex-partner stalkers are a distinctive category with respect to their prevalence, violence risk, and attrition rate. Different samples and definitions and false victimization reports obscure reliable lifetime prevalence estimates, but these appear to be around 12%-16% among women and 4%-7% among men. Stalking has deleterious effects on victims but some of the effects may be the result of stalking's exacerbating of existing vulnerabilities. Future research should focus on subgroups of stalkers and their victims, on cross-cultural investigations, and on the co-occurrence of stalking with other crimes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

LinkOut - more resources