Over the last decade, researchers have consistently reported that stalking is a disturbing reality for many individuals, especially youths. Cyberstalking, however, has received much less attention from the research community than stalking. Few estimates of cyberstalking victimization or cyberstalking offending have been published. The current study attempts to address these gaps by estimating lifetime prevalence of both cyberstalking victimization and offending among a sample of undergraduates from a large urban university in the Midwest. Results show that 40.8% had experienced cyberstalking victimization, with females, nonwhites, non-heterosexuals, and non-singles disproportionately experiencing cyberstalking. Approximately 4.9% of students had perpetrated cyberstalking, but there were few differences in offending across students' demographic characteristics.

Cyberstalking is a relatively understudied area in criminology, with no consensus among scholars as to whether it represents a modified form of stalking or whether it is an entirely new and emerging criminal phenomenon. Using data from the 2006 Supplemental Victimization Survey to the National Crime Victimization Survey, this study compares stalking and cyberstalking victims across several dimensions, including situational features of their experiences and self-protective behaviors. Results indicate that there are significant differences between stalking and cyberstalking victims, including their number of self-protective behaviors adopted, duration of contact with their stalker, financial costs of victimization, and perceived fear at onset. Perceived fear over time, the occurrence of a physical attack, and sex of the victim were all associated with a higher number of self-protective behaviors for cyberstalking victims compared to stalking victims, net of the effect of the control variables. Implications for stalking theory, research, and criminal justice policy are discussed.

Building upon Eck and Clarke's (2003) ideas for explaining crimes in which there is no face-to-face contact between victims and offenders, the authors developed an adapted lifestyle-routine activities theory. Traditional conceptions of place-based environments depend on the convergence of victims and offenders in time and physical space to explain opportunities for victimization. With their proposed cyberlifestyle-routine activities theory, the authors moved beyond this conceptualization to explain opportunities for victimization in cyberspace environments where traditional conceptions of time and space are less relevant. Cyberlifestyle-routine activities theory was tested using a sample of 974 college students on a particular type of cybervictimization-cyberstalking. The study's findings provide support for the adapted theoretical perspective. Specifically, variables measuring online exposure to risk, online proximity to motivated offenders, online guardianship, online target attractiveness, and online deviance were significant predictors of cyberstalking victimization. Implications for advancing cyberlifestyle-routine activities theory are discussed.

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