The Wheel of Change Moves On: Assessing the Severity of Stalking Behavior

Abstract

Stalking is a significant social issue. The inconsistency as to what defines stalking has resulted in the creation of different methods to measure the crime. However, there has been minimal work done that assesses the severity of individual stalking behaviors. The aim of the present study was to assess the level of stalking behavior in terms of severity within a randomly selected sample of 924 cases from the database of the National Stalking Helpline. Item response theory analyses were used to assist in developing a scale that displays the ranking order of each stalking behavior. These analyses were also used to examine whether the stalking behavioral items created a single continuum of severity of stalking. Results indicated that 16 stalking behavioral items of the 28 items present in the National Stalking Helpline, best represented the severity of stalking. Unwanted communication behaviors such as text messages and phone calls were located at the lower end of the severity scale, whereas criminal damage and death threats were mapped on the higher end of the continuum. The findings also revealed that the 16 items categorized under 6 factors. The findings of the present study provide many implications for stalking agency professionals and criminal justice responses.

A Wolf in sheep’s clothing: taxometric evidence of the dimensional structure of stalking

“…IRT analyses found that the SSBS adequately covers the spectrum of stalking and has items that map on different levels of stalking involvement. While the Guttman structure of the scale needs to be replicated in other samples, and its nomological network study, the structure found by Stefanska et al (2021b) should be considered to develop future stalking scales. Additionally, some items of the SSBS overlap with the Stalking Tactics Scales (STS; Senkans et al, 2017), which provide information on the duration as well as the numbers of behaviours experienced, or the Stalking Assessment Indices (SAI-P; McEwan et al, 2020aMcEwan et al, , 2020b, which provide information on the presence and frequency of behaviours experienced as well as their duration.…”

“…While some of the behaviours may not be perceived as serious (e.g. browsing someone’s social media without their consent and knowledge, sending unsolicited text messages), it is the persistence and the level of intrusion by the stalker that makes the behaviour criminal (Stefanska et al , 2021b). Victims of stalking can experience a wide array of psychological, physical, social or financial costs (Chan and Sheridan, 2019; Chan et al , 2020).…”

Post break‐up stalking: Police‐officers' perceptions

“…To the best of our knowledge, the study conducted by Stefanska et al. (2021) is a pioneer in assessing this issue. Using a randomly selected sample of 924 cases from the database of the National Stalking Helpline (United Kingdom), the authors concluded that some specific stalking behaviors better represent the severity of stalking than others.…”

Dark Traits, Harassment and Rape Myths Acceptances Among University Students

“…Studies have shown that the four facets of the Dark Tetrad are dimensional constructs that can be present among everyone, and across gender, but at different levels (Guay et al, 2007(Guay et al, , 2018Longpré, Guay et al, 2018;Plouffe et al, 2021). Recent studies have shown that the dark traits are good predictors of sexual violence (Beckett & Longpré, 2022), problematic sexual behaviors (Snow & Longpré, 2022), as well as stalking , which conceptually overlap with harassment (Longpré et al, 2022;Stefanska et al, 2022). The current manuscript aims to study the impact of the dark traits and gender on rape myths acceptance and perception of harassment.…”