In the Campus Shadows, Women Are Stalkers as Well as the Stalked

New studies on college victim rates prompt debate

By ANDREW BROWNSTEIN

Twice.

They only kissed twice. To the other freshmen in the Central Michigan University

ALSO SEE: Stalking in the General Population and at 2 Colleges College Women: How They Were Stalked Colloquy: Join a debate on issues raised in this article

dormitory, the relationship didn't look like much. Nothing that would explain the incessant calls that later came to the room and on the pager. The hang-ups. The watching through the peephole of the dorm-room door.

Police officers would call it a clear-cut case of stalking. What might seem unusual about this story, however, is that the victim was a man.

"I was scared," says Matt Owens, now a senior at Central Michigan majoring in communications. "I kept thinking: This girl is nuts. If that was a guy making countless phone calls and sitting outside the door, he'd be in big trouble."

A new study suggests such experiences are far more prevalent on college campuses than one might expect. The survey of 756 students at Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania found that, while women are still more likely to have been stalked, men constitute a surprising 42 percent of victims. That compares with 22 percent in the most recent survey of the national population. Female stalkers are three times as likely to be found at the two colleges than in the population at large.

The man-bites-dog finding is one of several to emerge from a flurry of studies that point to the unusual dynamics of stalking on college campuses. Later this month, the National Institute of Justice will release results from the largest study of stalking

COLLEGE WOMEN: HOW THEY WERE STALKED The figures are from a random phone survey of 4,446 female students at 223 colleges and universities in the United States. Of those called, 696, or 13 percent, said they had been stalked during a seven-month period in 1997. Type of behavior Percentage Telephoned 78% Waited outside or inside places 48% Watched from afar 44% Followed 42% Sent letters 31% E-mailed 25% Showed up uninvited 5% Sent gifts 3% Other 11% Note: The totals do not add to 100 percent because some stalking patterns involved more than one type of behavior. SOURCE: National Institute for Justice, University of Cincinnati

on college campuses thus far. The random survey of more than 4,400 students -- all women -- found that more than 13 percent said they had been stalked in the past seven months, compared to the national figure of 8 percent.

It should be no surprise that stalking is more common on campuses. It is, in general, a crime against young people, the typical victim being between 18 and 29. If crime is about means, motive, and opportunity, college is the land of opportunity for stalkers.

"Stalking is all about knowing someone's routine," says Bonnie S. Fisher, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati and the principal investigator on the national institute's study. "On college campuses, you know where people live, when their classes are, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to find their e-mail address. In many ways, they're the perfect targets."

The studies are likely to prompt debate on just what constitutes stalking, how men and women perceive fear, and how campuses should deal with what has become pervasive in dorm rooms and chat rooms alike.

The gender issue is bound to be the most controversial. Stalking is generally thought of as a crime against women. California passed the first anti-stalking law in the nation in 1990 in response to the murder of the actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was shot to death by an obsessed fan who had stalked her for two years. The original thought was that stalking was a step to more violent crimes, whose perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. The National Institute of Justice found the notion of woman-as-stalking-victim so self-evident that it excluded men from its study.

The authors of the Rutgers survey are bluntly agnostic about what their findings on male victims mean. "We got zilch. We don't have a clue," says Shirley A. Smoyak, professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers and the lead author on that study.

Timothy Baker, adjunct professor of nursing at Penn and a collaborator on the study, has a theory -- thus far, unproved -- that he predicts will catch him "a lot of flak" within academe: "Women are coming into their own. As women take on the roles traditionally relegated to men, they inevitably take on some of the negative aspects as well." As usual, Mr. Baker suggests, colleges are seeing this trend before the general population.

The as-yet-unpublished Rutgers study still must be replicated. Some critics argue that two elite universities in the Northeast are not representative of college campuses as a whole. Furthermore, a good portion of the students surveyed came from what researchers call a "convenience sample," a class on victimology at Penn -- making the results less than random.

Police officials and victim's advocates are divided in their reactions to the findings, but a surprising number say they're seeing the same, roughly even split between male and female victims in their work.

Judi King, chief of police at California State University at Fullerton, says the breakdown is "pretty much 50-50." Like many researchers, she suspects substantial underreporting by male victims due to sexist stereotypes -- this time, against men. "They don't report it because they don't want to be seen as weak," she says. "It's the age-old idea that men are supposed to be able to take care of themselves."

Brian H. Spitzberg, a professor of communication at San Diego State University, finds "no gender differences" among college victims in his research on "obsessive relational intrusion," a term that encompasses stalking and more minor forms of hounding, such as leaving unwanted gifts or making repeated telephone calls.

But he adds one important caveat: Women are far more likely to be terrorized by such incidents, due to what he calls "the creep factor."

"Our society still constructs a world that's more threatening to women," he says.

Take the story of Amber, a 29-year-old corporate-communications executive who consulted with Mr. Spitzberg in 1996 when she was getting her master's degree at San Diego State.

Amber, who did not want to reveal her last name, initially thought little of the notes she found on the windshield of her car. The words, written in a script too perfect to be a man's, she thought, clearly indicated someone who knew her movements. "I liked your hair today," read one. And another: "Did you enjoy debate class?"

At first, when a lost high-school acquaintance invited her out for coffee, she did not link his out-of-the-blue appearance with the strange notes. The meeting was pleasant, she says, until "he started saying strange things, like he forgave me for going out with my boyfriend."

Then came the obsessive phone calls to her apartment and her parents' house. One day after class, she went to the parking lot to find a funereal display of roses on the hood of her sports-utility vehicle -- hundreds of baby roses, red and pink, each intricately ribboned.

One night, after he followed her around the campus parking lot, she called the police. Their subsequent search of his apartment and car yielded enough to give anyone pause: two unlicensed handguns and a shrine of photos that showed he'd been watching her from afar for years.

Last year, Amber's three-year restraining order against her stalker expired. She still lives in fear. "This guy is so mentally unstable," she says. "I have no belief that he will leave me alone in the future."

It is tempting to contrast her situation with that of Mr. Owens, the Central Michigan student who said he was stalked. He had no problem giving his name to a reporter, and even being photographed. Amber, meanwhile, considered her situation so severe that upon graduation, she moved away from San Diego to escape her stalker. Only her family and a few friends have her current address.

It is experiences like Amber's that make Stephen M. Thompson wonder if the authors of the Rutgers study aren't trivializing the experiences of stalking victims. The fact is, men are bigger and stronger, says Mr. Thompson, sexual-assault-services coordinator at Central Michigan and author of No More Fear, a study of sexual violence and its victims. Put simply, women have more reason to be afraid.

"In my experience, men report because it's a damn nuisance," he says. "Women report out of a primal fear. I would debate with anybody that it's the same feeling."

He says the study's numbers showing that men make up 42 percent of stalking victims look "damned high"; only 15 percent of the stalking victims who report to his office are men.

The inevitable problem with any stalking research is the way the act is defined. In the decade since the first statute was passed in California, all of the other states and the federal government enacted their own stalking laws, with their own quirks and nuances. Most statutes use some form of a definition cited in the National Institute of Justice's study: "a repeated behavior that seemed obsessive and made the respondent afraid or concerned for her safety."

But the Rutgers and Penn researchers omitted the definition, instead asking respondents if they had been the object of a set of stalking-related behaviors, from being followed to receiving unwanted e-mail messages.

The results from the national study and the Rutgers research were nonetheless similar in many respects. The telephone topped both lists as the mode of choice for stalkers (it was used in 78 percent of cases, in both studies), with following being a distant second (42 percent in the national study and 53 percent in the Rutgers study.) But without additional research to determine how fearful the subjects were, some critics say it is hard to know whether the male and female respondents in the Rutgers study were talking about the same thing.

The Rutgers researchers say they omitted the definition on purpose. The authors believe college students are largely ignorant of what the law says about stalking. To many students, stalkers are like O.J. Stalking victims? That's Letterman and Madonna, not me.

Such ignorance is one reason that George Mason University enacted a comprehensive stalking policy in 1999. It remains perhaps the only university policy in the country that spells out what stalking is and lists specific punishments for violators.

In a policy that goes further than many laws, George Mason defines activities occurring "on more than one occasion," including "non-consensual touching" and "threatening gestures," to be stalking. It says violators will be subject to disciplinary action and criminal prosecution. And it advises victims to "get caller I.D. if possible," change travel routes frequently, and keep a journal of stalking incidents. (The full policy can be found at the university's Web site (http://www.gmu.edu/facstaff/sexual/ffstalkingcode.html.)

Connie J. Kirkland, the coordinator of sexual-assault services at George Mason, urged the university to enact the policy when she realized that roughly a third of the students who came to her were stalking victims whose problems were unrelated to sexual assault. (Incidentally, she is not seeing higher number of stalking cases against men. She says that 95 percent of the cases she handles are reported by women.)

Another educational effort, the Love Me Not campaign, was unveiled by the Los Angeles district attorney's office last Valentine's Day. Given that the typical stalking victim is college age, the office decided to focus on students by training police officers at five local colleges and flooding campuses with billboards and bookmarks advertising a 24-hour hot line and an advice-filled Web site (http://www.lovemenot.org). According to Scott Gordon, the deputy district attorney in charge of the city's stalking-and-threat team, more than 300 students have made stalking reports to the hot line since February.

Some colleges find that simply raising awareness goes a long way. "Frequently, stalkers are unaware that they are instilling fear or that they are breaking the law," says Ms. King, of California State at Fullerton. "We usually find that sitting them down in the station and talking to them is all we need to do."

Stalking on college campuses rarely turns violent. Ms. King says she has had only one such case in her year as chief. In the Rutgers study, 12 percent of the female victims and 3 percent of the males said their pursuers had become violent.

In the beginning, the prosecution of stalking was seen primarily as a deterrent to more-destructive actions down the road. Now, the focus is much more on the psychological toll of the act itself. That shift may be the best explanation for the larger number of men appearing as victims, Ms. King says.

"If you know someone is always watching you and won't stop, no matter how many times they are told, that causes fear," she says. "There doesn't have to be any touching. It's mostly a mental issue, and it's been my experience that men are affected much the same as women are."

In Ms. King's view, it is the psychological instability of the stalker, more so than his or her size or power, that strikes fear in the victim.

In one recent case she handled, a lesbian student obsessed with a female faculty member followed the professor everywhere. She called her incessantly and waited at her apartment door in the morning. She made statements like: "If I can't have you, no one will."

The student is now finishing a two-year jail sentence for violating five restraining orders filed by the faculty member. "That professor is scared to death," Ms. King says. "She wonders all the time: What happens when she gets out?"

Stalking that involves a professor is actually quite rare, representing less than 1 percent of the cases in the national institute's study. The likeliest stalker is a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend (42 percent), followed by a classmate (25 percent) and an acquaintance (10.3 percent).

From these studies and others, scholars are trying to determine what makes stalkers tick. A good deal of research shows that stalkers generally had trouble forming nurturing relationships early in childhood, particularly with their parents. Or as Ms. Smoyak of Rutgers likes to put it, "Something went wrong in attachment-land." That may be one reason stalkers feel rejection so intensely, why they create elaborate fantasies of their relationships to their victims, a neverworld that is often nourished in the anonymity of the Internet.

Ms. Smoyak is hoping to kindle the debate with future research -- she is coordinating a national study to further examine the gender issue -- and by holding the first conference on collegiate stalking at Rutgers in May. Among the topics: cyberstalking, the administrative response to the crime, and the effect of stalking on victims.

This last topic is a salient one for George Mason's Ms. Kirkland, who says she has helped several students withdraw from classes because of the disastrous effects of stalking in their lives. Just this fall, she says, she helped a female engineering student with a 4.0 grade-point average drop out for a semester after she faced relentless harassment from an ex-boyfriend.

"She lost her tuition," Ms. Kirkland says. "She lost a semester. And she has to explain it all to parents and her friends. In these cases, it is always the victim who loses."

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