Research into Stalkers

This was taken from a website called 'Network for Surviving Stalking' and it has information about the types of stalkers and what they can do. It also contains statistics of how many cases of a certain type of stalker occur. Here is the link to the website; http://www.nss.org.uk/about/stalking-facts-figures/stalker-types/

In my teaser trailer, the stalker is a sadistic stalker. This is what NSS said about sadistic stalkers;

Sadistic stalking (12.9% of cases)

Characteristics:

• victim is an obsessive target of the offender, and who’s life is seen as quarry and prey (incremental orientation)
• victim selection criteria is primarily rooted in the victim being:

(i) someone worthy of spoiling, i.e. someone who is perceived by the stalker at the commencement as being:
- happy
- ‘good’
- stable
- content
and (ii) lacking in the victim’s perception any just rationale as to why she was targeted

• initial low level acquaintance
• apparently benign initially but unlike infatuation harassment the means of intervention tend to have negative orientation designed to disconcert, unnerve, and ergo take power away from the victim

- notes left in victim’s locked car in order to unsettle target (cf. billet-doux of infatuated harassment)
- subtle evidence being left of having been in contact with the victim’s personal items e.g. rifled underwear drawer, re-ordering/removal of private papers, cigarette ends left in ash trays, toilet having been used etc.
- ‘helping’ mend victims car that stalker had previously disabled

• thereafter progressive escalation of control over all aspects (i.e. social, historical, professional, financial, physical) of the victim’s life
• offender gratification is rooted in the desire to extract evidence of the victim’s powerlessness with inverse implications for his power => sadism
• additional implication => self-perpetuating in desire to hone down relentlessly on individual victim(s)
• emotional coldness, deliberateness and psychopathy (cf. the heated nature of ex-partner harassment)
• tended to have a history of stalking behaviour and the controlling of others
• stalker tended to broaden out targets to family and friends in a bid to isolate the victim and further enhance his control
• communications tended to be a blend of loving and threatening (not hate) designed to de-stabilise and confuse the victim
• threats were either overt (“We’re going to die together”) or subtle (delivery of dead roses)
• stalker could be highly dangerous – in particular with psychological violence geared to the controlling of the victim with fear, loss of privacy and the curtailment of her social world
• physical violence was also entirely possible – especially by means which undermine the victim’s confidence in matters normally taken for granted e.g. disabling brake cables, disarming safety equipment, cutting power off
• sexual content of communications was aimed primarily to intimidate through the victim’s humiliation, disgust and general undermining of self-esteem
• the older the offender, the more likely he would have enacted sadistic stalking before and would not be likely to offend after 40 years of age if not engaged in such stalking before
• victim was likely to be re-visited after a seeming hiatus