YGet a vivid insight into how alarming stalking can be just by listening to the stories of victims in the Netflix documentary Can I Tell You a Secret?, based on the Guardian podcast by Shirin Kale. I was able to do that. Matthew Hardy used impersonation and identity theft to manipulate, humiliate, and threaten multiple women on social media. But in one important respect, he was unconventional. Some of his targets were acquaintances, but others were strangers who lived hundreds of miles away. Even more common is the experience of being stalked by someone you know.Data from the Susie Lamplugh Trust shows that in the year to March 2023, 66.5% of the victims’ girlfriends Stalking by ex-partner. Other perpetrators were friends and colleagues, but only 6% were strangers. Almost 90% of the victims were women.
Due to the severity of Hardy’s crimes, which lasted 11 years, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. However, this is extremely rare. Of the 117,672 reports of stalking made to police in England and Wales in the year to 2022, only 6.6% resulted in a prosecution and 1.4% resulted in a conviction. Less than a third of these resulted in custodial sentences, with the average sentence being about a year. The harsh reality is that most stalkers get away with their crimes.
This would be bad enough. What’s worse, in an alarming number of cases, stalking is a precursor to horrific violence. Between 2015 and 2017, 60 women in the UK were murdered by stalkers who reported them to the police. In one infamous case, a woman named Shana Grice was fined for wasting police time before she was killed. And in November, Derbyshire Police apologized for not handling Gracie Spinks’s stalking complaint before she was also murdered.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) guidance refers to the “obsessive” nature of stalking. In the case of Edward Vines, who was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2022 for stalking journalist Emily Maitlis, the obsession lasted for decades. If the stalking is racially aggravated, the penalty can be up to 14 years in prison. But a more frequent pattern is one where charges are downgraded to either harassment or less serious stalking offenses, but a lack of data hampers people’s efforts to scrutinize what’s going on. It will be done.
Clearer information from the CPS is one of the recommendations in a recent report from the Susie Lamplugh Trust. The charity also super dissatisfied It said there had been serious failures in the response to stalking crimes and called for more training for police, prosecutors and judges to strengthen their understanding of stalking crimes and the harm they cause. They also want to improve communication with victims. These criticisms reflect the following findings. separate report It is seven years old and is expected to be addressed soon. He said it has been 12 years since stalking was criminalized and it is deeply worrying that good practices have not caught on. Stalking protection orders (such as requiring devices to be confiscated or police to have access to social media accounts) need to be used more effectively until evidence is collected.
Victims of stalking are not the only ones facing damaging delays and disruptions due to court cuts and closures. However, the nature of this crime means that it is more likely than other crimes to continue until the perpetrator is stopped. Waiting for justice can sometimes involve waiting for extremely intrusive and disturbing harassment to end. Failure to tackle this issue effectively means that too many victims remain at risk.
