Cyberstalking: Is someone watching you?
A brief report issued by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) during September last year examined the complex issues surrounding this new form of stalking. The report--compiled by post-doctoral fellow of the Criminology Research Council Dr Emma Ogilve--identifies three major forms of cyberstalking: email stalking, Internet stalking and computer stalking.
Email stalking is similar in many respects to traditional forms of stalking, according to Ogilve. "In many ways, stalking via email represents the closest replication of traditional stalking patterns," writes Ogilve. "Given that the most common forms of stalking behaviour are telephoning and sending mail, the adoption of email by stalkers is not surprising."
Email combines the immediacy of a telephone call with the separation entailed in a letter, explains Ogilve, and is often used to threaten or traumatise a person. Fortunately, it is this particular type of cyberstalking that tends to get prosecuted.
The first cyberstalking case to be prosecuted in Queensland related to a woman who received email correspondence that "began amicably, but then became more threatening once she sought to end the communication". Eventually, the offender sent death threats and also threatened to have her videotaped while being pack-raped and then post the resulting images to the Internet.
Ogilve believes that, while some may think that email communications are "less-invasive" than telephone calls, "email harassment constitutes an uninvited and arguably threatening incursion into private space".
Internet stalking is a much broader method and generally moves from the private sphere to the public realm. Offenders might choose to take on the identity of the person they are stalking in chat rooms or they might publish to a Web site personal details of the victim. Ogilve explains that this form of cyberstalking is the one most likely to spill over into the real world.
One example of this occurred in the US where a young man maintained a Web site dedicated to a female high school classmate whom he believed had humiliated him. After 2 years of discovering and posting intimate details of the woman--including social security number, license plate number and place of employment--he outlined his plans to murder her. Less than an hour after his final Web site update the offender drove to the woman's workplace and shot her as she got into her car.
A similar case in Australia had an older male stalking a young boy who he followed with a camera. The older male placed updates of the boy's activities on his personal Web site where the offender also included descriptions of his own paedopillia and detailed his dangerousness to others that might threaten him. Fortunately, the offender was charged with stalking before he could act out his desires.
The final form of cyberstalking, computer stalking, requires a reasonably high level of technical knowledge and is not as common--or distancing--as the other forms. Essentially this form of stalking results in the offender somehow being able to control the victim's computer via the Internet, using various software tools and scripts.
This is not a common form of stalking and, in fact, there only appears to be one recorded instance of this type of offence. Ogilve writes: "A woman received a message stating 'I'm going to get you', the interloper then opened the woman's CD-ROM drive in order to prove he had control of her computer."
While Ogilve accepts that these offences impinge on personal freedom in "cyberspace", she also notes that the most effective means of control is prevention, either through personal protection or using technological solutions such as filtering.
"Personal information should not be recorded on the Internet and people should hesitate before filling in electronic forms which request names, age, addresses, together with likes and dislikes," says Ogilve. "Similarly, people can be proactive before signing on to an ISP by researching beforehand whether there are specific policies prohibiting harassment, abusive behaviours and cyberstalking."
