Cyberstalking
is a Growing Problem
Although there is no comprehensive,
nationwide data on the extent of cyberstalking in the United States, some
ISPs compile statistics on the number and types of complaints of harassment
and/or threats involving their subscribers, and individual law enforcement
agencies have compiled helpful statistics. There is, moreover, a growing amount
of anecdotal and informal evidence on the nature and extent of cyberstalking.
First, data on offline stalking
may provide some insight into the scope of the cyberstalking problem. According
to the most recent National Violence Against Women Survey, which defines stalking
as referring to instances where the victim felt a high level of fear:
In the United States, one out of every 12 women
(8.2 million) and one out of every 45 men (2 million) have been stalked
at some time in their lives.
One percent of all women and 0.4 percent
of all men were stalked during the preceding 12 months.
Women are far more likely to be the victims
of stalking than men - nearly four out of five stalking victims are women.
Men are far more likely to be stalkers - 87 percent of the stalkers identified
by victims in the survey were men.
Women are twice as likely as men to be
victims of stalking by strangers and eight times as likely to be victims
of stalking by intimates.
In the United States, there are currently more than 80 million adults and 10 million children with access to the Internet. Assuming the proportion of cyberstalking victims is even a fraction of the proportion of persons who have been the victims of offline stalking within the preceding 12 months, there may be potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of victims of recent cyberstalking incidents in the United States. Although such a "back of the envelope" calculation is inherently uncertain and speculative (given that it rests on an assumption about very different populations), it does give a rough sense of the potential magnitude of the problem.
Second, anecdotal evidence from
law enforcement agencies indicates that cyberstalking is a serious - and growing
- problem. At the federal level, several dozen matters have been referred
(usually by the FBI) to U.S. Attorney's Offices for possible action. A number
of these cases have been referred to state and local law enforcement agencies
because the conduct does not appear to violate federal law.
In addition, some local law enforcement
agencies are beginning to see cases of cyberstalking. For example, the Los
Angeles District Attorney's Office estimates that e-mail or other electronic
communications were a factor in approximately 20 percent of the roughly 600
cases handled by its Stalking and Threat Assessment Unit. The chief of the
Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office also estimates
that about 20 percent of the cases handled by the unit involve cyberstalking.
The Computer Investigations and Technology Unit of the New York City Police
Department estimates that almost 40 percent of the caseload in the unit involves
electronic threats and harassment -- and virtually all of these have occurred
in the past three or four years.
Third, ISPs also are receiving
a growing number of complaints about harassing and threatening behavior online.
One major ISP receives approximately 15 complaints per month of cyberstalking,
in comparison to virtually no complaints of cyberstalking just one or two
years ago.
Finally, as part of a large study
on sexual victimization of college women, researchers at the University of
Cincinnati conducted a national telephone survey of 4,446 randomly selected
women attending two- and four-year institutions of higher education. The survey
was conducted during the 1996-97 academic year. In this survey, a stalking
incident was defined as a case in which a respondent answered positively when
asked if someone had "repeatedly followed you, watched you, phoned, written,
e-mailed, or communicated with you in other ways that seemed obsessive and
made you afraid or concerned for your safety." The study found that 581
women (13.1 percent) were stalked and reported a total of 696 stalking incidents;
the latter figure exceeds the number of victims because 15 percent of the
women experienced more than one case of stalking during the survey period.
Of these 696 stalking incidents, 166 (24.7 percent) involved e-mail. Thus,
25 percent of stalking incidents among college women could be classified as
involving cyberstalking.
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