January 1, 1999

The typology of stalking was the subject of an Australian psychiatrist's presentation at the October annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law. Paul Mullen, M.B., B.S., D.Sc., of Victorian Forensic Psychiatry Services in Australia, explained that stalking is a constellation of behaviors involving repeated or persistent attempts to impose on another person unwanted communication or contact.

Mullen's study concentrated on subjects referred to the forensic services clinic in 1993 by themselves, courts, parole officers, or medical practitioners. The victim's complaints of harassment in the form of repeated and persistent intrusions was a defining characteristic in the cases, he said.

The relationships of stalkers to their victims were varied in nature. Thirty percent of victims were former partners, 23 percent were professional contacts (many mental health professionals), 20 percent casual acquaintances, and 16 percent people with whom there had been no prior contact. The duration of stalking lasted from four weeks to 20 years, with a median of 12 months. It took the forms of telephone calls, letters, and notes on property such as cars or building walls.

"To be subject to these kinds of behavior over weeks, months, and years is an enormous burden, and it is enormously destructive to the victims," Mullen emphasized.

Common behaviors of the stalkers included giving unsolicited gifts such as chocolate, flowers, pornography magazines and videos, and photos of the stalker or victims. Some were grotesque - a dead pig's head or a coffin, for example. Some stalkers ordered services such as pizza delivery for their victims. Others initiated spurious legal action, a behavior that is becoming increasingly common, said Mullen.

"One thing that has happened with antistalking legislation is that some stalkers swear out complaints against victims--a very effective way of confusing attempts to prosecute stalkers," he said.

Another action stalkers sometimes take if they lose touch with victims is to report them to police as having committed an offense so that the police find them, Mullen observed.

In the study, 69 percent of stalkers threatened victims, and 39 percent threatened third parties, said Mullen. (These findings were at higher levels than in other studies, he noted.) Thirty-six percent attacked their victims physically, pushing or punching them. One physical assault ended in hospitalization. Three rapes by stalkers were reported.

Stalkers come mainly from among the lonely, isolated, and disadvantaged of society but can include people from the whole social and psychological spectrum, said Mullen. Some have delusional disorders or paranoid schizophrenia.

Categories of stalkers Mullen noticed in his normed, systematic study include the rejected, incompetent, resentful, and predatory. The rejected are people who have lost the central intimate relationship in their lives. They are trying to reestablish a relationship, get revenge for "the insult of rejection," or both, said Mullen. They experience a combination of intense anger, sense of loss, and sadness and have a desire for both reconciliation and revenge.

Many stalkers seek intimacy and are trying to establish a relationship, he added. They may have a morbid fascination with someone. It is not unusual for them to be suffering from a severe mental disorder. The incompetent or intellectually or socially impaired want a relationship and are usually easy to dissuade. They can be helped with social skills training, he pointed out. The predatory stalkers are often preparing for sexual attack. They intend to frighten or stress victims with whom they have usually had a quarrel.

Those most likely to assault include former partners of victims, people who have been rejected, the predatory, those with convictions for violence, and substance abusers.

The risk of violence is lower among individuals seeking intimacy with their victims and those with psychotic illnesses, said Mullen. The resentful stalkers threaten the most but almost never attack, he noted. They may make carefully veiled threats without breaking the law or without breaking it in a way that is easy to prosecute.

"If you took our primary typology and prior convictions, 74 percent of assaults could be predicted," said Mullen.

Bringing stalking to an end involves an appropriate mixture of therapeutic interventions and judicial sanctions. "It is very difficult," he noted, "to manage stalkers in clinics where you don't have a close relationship and very easy access to correctional police as a backup."

The rejected and personality-disordered stalkers may respond very well to judicial sanctions when they know the price of their behavior is high and if they understand they could end up in prison, according to Mullen. These groups also benefit from long-term therapy, he noted.

There were relatively high levels of Axis I and II disorders in the stalkers he studied. Their illnesses consisted mostly of delusional disorders, erotomania, morbid jealousy, persecution delusions, and morbid infatuations. Most of these stalkers are personally inept, said Mullen. They have an enormous sense of entitlement, especially to relationships, and they need long-term therapy that includes work on social skills and perceptions of their roles and their relationships to others.

Treatment is sometimes successful and sometimes not, he noted.

Treating them with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) makes sense if patients are depressive, said Mullen. It lays the groundwork for more fundamental therapeutic work.

Suicide did not occur in any of the stalking cases Mullen studied, though he said stalkers could be expected to be at high risk because people prone to committing violence have a very high risk of directing that violence toward themselves. Mullen said he would not be surprised if in the long run this group has a high mortality rate.