Organized Stalking Stats

November 5, 2009

The following statistics support the allegations made on this web site:

The following statistic covers all reports to police relating to infractions of Canada's "Criminal Harassment" law, which covers stalking. The statement is from Statistics Canada, the federal agency which maintains statistics for all areas of Canadian life, including policing. The following statement was in response to Eleanor White's request for a checkoff item on Canada's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system denoting harassment reports involving simultaneous multiple harassers (Chief, Policing Services Program responding):
"Thank you for e-mail of Jan. 17. There is no need to add a new field to the national Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey to collect information on multiple harassers, as a field already exists for the identification of multiple accused persons for all criminal incidents reported to police. As an example, of the 10,756 incidents of criminal harassment reported to police in 2006, 1,429 of these (or 13%) involved more than one accused."
That is one criminal harassment report in eight, a very significant percentage. While not all of these would strictly fall under the organized stalking category, this rate of simultaneous multiple harassment reports at least hints that organized stalking may not be as rare as the general public seems to think.
A U.S. Department of Justice special report, January 2009, NCJ 224527, titled Stalking Victimization in the United States, which is available at this link (as of January 2009):
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/svus.pdf
Click here if the above link is broken
... reported the following statistics showing the occurrence of multiple stalking cases within the total of all U.S. recorded stalking cases in the 2005-2006 time range:
"During a 12-month period an estimated 14 in every 1,000 persons age 18 or older were victims of stalking - About half (46%) of stalking victims experienced ...
* 11% of victims said they had been stalked for 5 years or more.
[Eleanor White commenting: "5 years or more" is very characteristic of organized stalking, which usually never stops because the justice systems refuse to acknowledge this crime.]
* An average of 10.6 percent of some 4.6 million stalking and harassment victims don't know the stalkers, since they're complete strangers.
[Eleanor White commenting: Almost all organized stalking is carried out by strangers, or people the target may know by sight but has never interacted with. The "4.6 million" figure above includes both stalking and harassment victims.]
* Appendix table 3. Number of stalking offenders perceived by victim:
One 62.1%
Two 18.2%
Three or more 13.1%
Number unknown 6.5%
Total Number of victims 3,398,630
[Eleanor White comment: Adding three or more to number unknown, gives 19.6%. That suggests ~666,000 U.S. stalking victims may be organized stalking targets.]
See also an affidavit from an attorney who pressed NCVC (U.S. National Center for Victims of Crime) for a statement of the size of their call volume relating to "gang" or "organized" or "group" stalking. The NCVC estimated thousands of such calls per year, and a volume of about 10% of all their calls.
A report on stalking posted by the American Journal of Psychiatry on their web site, journal reference 158:795-798, May 2001, states ... 6 out of 201 (3%) respondents reported multiple stalkers... Compare that with the 13% in criminal harassment cases above, reported by Statistics Canada, and clearly, stalking by multiple stalkers is a very real crime, acknowledged by mainstream professionals.
Note carefully: There is such a thing as PROXY stalking, in which a single stalker, motivated by amorous interest or mental illness enlists helpers. Organized stalking is NOT proxy stalking, but rather is stalking by a group totally independent of whomever originally submitted the target's name to the stalking group. The stalking group typically has no knowledge of why the target's name was submitted, and instead is given a lie, often that the target is a pedophile, to motivate the group stalking effort.
Link to the AJP article: http://tinyurl.com/3fa3yw
Alternate link if above link is broken.
Article: "The Course and Nature of Stalking: A Victim Perspective"
Authors: Sheridan, Davies, Boon
Source: Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 40, Number 3, August 2001 , pp. 215-234(20)
In 5% of the cases (5/95), there was more than one stalker. pp.219
"In 5 cases perpetrators were part of a group..", pp.219
"... [40%] of victims (38) said that friends and or family of their stalker had also been involved in their harassment... This is a surprising find as the popular view of a stalker is of a lone and secretive individual." pp.222 [COMMENT: This suggests that the above "5%" cases may have been groups other than family or friends, which is suggestive of organized stalking as opposed to simple proxy stalking. Organized stalking involves groups which are networked everywhere, while proxy stalking has a single stalker who has a very personal focus on the target. Organized stalking groups also work on more than one target, unlike proxy stalking.]
Typical of organized stalking: "In 15% of cases, the victim could provide no possible reason for their harassment" pp.226
Statistics from the book Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace show that in Sweden, about 3.5% of the working population is subject to mobbing, which is organized stalking in the workplace. 3.5% of working people is roughly 1 person in a hundred total, and is in line with the organized stalking survey above.
Statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control concerning harassment and stalking cases give an overall figure for the U.S. of 4.5 people per 100 as having been harassed or stalked at one time. Our informal survey's result of about one person per 100 being targeted by organized stalking fits well within that 4.5 per 100 figure. (Source, ABC News)
Statistics from the British (government) Home Office state that 1,900,000 people in the United Kingdom were victims of stalking or harassment at any one time as of the year 2001. That is about 3 people per hundred. Here again, the organized stalking survey's 1 person in a hundred is not out of line. Most interesting is that roughly 45% of the stalking victims are MEN! That suggests a very different picture from the conventional view of stalking victims being mostly women, and may well point toward the type of stalking described here, on this web site. Click here for documentation. (Graph below shows all harassment offences, not specifically stalking.)

* Oh, and here's another British stalking statistic:
Home Office Research Study 210 (1998 data):
THE OFFENDERS
The majority (79%) of incidents involved only one perpetrator.
[...]
Strangers were responsible in 34 per cent of incidents.
Those statistics are strongly suggestive of organized stalking, 79% involved one perpetrator means 21% involved more than one perpetrator. And stalking by strangers is the usual situation with organized stalkers. Even if only 5% of stalking cases are organized, 5% of a million cases could mean 50,000 organized stalking cases in the United Kingdom alone.
For people who have trouble believing that stalkers can be as cunning and nasty as reports from organized stalking targets indicate, a psychiatrist, below, refers to one statistic indicating that as many as one stalker in just eight fits the observed personality of organized group stalkers:
Excerpt from book STALKING, by Debra A. Pinals, MD, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, page 42:
CLINICAL ASPECTS OF STALKING
"Finally the fourth type of stalking in the Sheridan and Boon (2002) taxonomy, sadistic stalking, comprised 12.9% of their sample. This construct looked at the victim in particular, identifying the victim as someone worth "spoiling" (Sheridan & Boon, 2002), and as someone who would not understand why they were targeted.
"The target and stalker began as low-level acquaintances, but eventually the stalker's motive is to frighten or demoralize the victim. For example, the stalker might reorder or remove private papers, or leave notes inside the victim's car, leaving the victim with some evidence that the stalker has had contact with their personal property.
"As the behavior progresses, the stalkers attempt to take full control of the victims' lives. Their behavior may include implied threats (e.g. pictures of tombstones) and sexual communications that intimidate or humiliate but would avoid directly pointing to the perpetrator.
"There may be reprieves from the behavior, which may later resume after a hiatus. These types of stalkers may work hard to defy police."
Screen shot of the page from the original book.
A survey like this one on this site was posted on a high volume news site in 2002. 12,000 people visited that survey in 24 hours. About 120 sent in responses saying they had most or all of the symptoms of organized stalking. That is 1 person in a hundred, primarily in North America. (To be on the safe side, a rate of one organized stalking target per 1,000 people is probably better.)