Can you imagine being watched, followed and terrorised? Can you imagine feeling frightened, unsafe and reclusive? Can you imagine wondering what you have done to make you a victim? How can he/she be everywhere but nowhere?
They know you but you don’t know them. They can see you but you can’t see them. They are watching you and you don’t even know it.
It’s not an advert for blockbuster horror movie but real life for many stalked victims.
1 in 10 men and 1 in 6 women are stalked. Over 120,000 people report stalking to the police each year. The figures are astonishing. This form of harassment is on the increase, especially cyber stalking. The law doesn’t protect normal civilians as it does celebrities but this is all about to change.
The Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Stalking Law Reform called for key changes to be made to training, risk assessments and the treatment and sentencing of stalkers in the Government’s ongoing review of harassment legislation. It comes after a man who stalked his ex-girlfriend on Facebook before stabbing her to death was found guilty of murder.
Clifford Mills, 49, attacked Lorna Smith after inviting her to his flat in Brixton, south London, in February last year. He denied murder, claiming that he was suffering a mental abnormality at the time, but an Old Bailey jury took just 90 minutes to find him guilty on Friday.
I don’t know what it is like to be stalked but I can imagine how frightening this is, how it can leave a person psychologically scarred and ruin their life. Reform couldn’t come too soon.
Bunty
