STALKERS: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TERRORIST

[Cassie]

It Takes A Star

Rebecca Schaeffer, 21, played a character on the popular 1980s television sitcom, My Sister Sam, and she had just starred in her first movie. As her popularity grew, she received increasingly more fan mail and she tried to respond to each letter personally.

A 19-year-old man from Tucson, Arizona, named Robert John Bardo had written to her and she had written back, sending a signed photograph. Bardo became fixated on the young television star and built a shrine to her in his room using media photos and videotapes of her shows. He tracked down where she lived through a detective agency, which got her address easily from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He also used computer databases to find out what kind of car she drove, whom she called, and where she shopped. Without Schaeffer’s knowledge, he had the goods on her and it made him feel close to her.

In 1987, he went twice to Warner Brothers Studios, once with a Teddy Bear and once with a knife, but was denied entrance. In his diary he wrote, "I don't lose. Period." When he saw Schaeffer in a movie scene in bed with someone, he decided she had to be punished for her immorality. He drew a diagram of her body and marked spots where he planned to shoot her.

At dawn on the morning of July 18, 1989, he went to Schaeffer's Hollywood apartment and began to pace, watching for any sign of her. Taking with him a copy of J.D. Salinger's novel, Catcher in the Rye, Bardo decided on a bold approach. After a courier had delivered scripts to someone in the building, he decided to just go ahead and ring the buzzer.

Schaeffer was about to meet with director Francis Ford Coppola to audition for his film, Godfather III. She heard the doorbell, but her voice intercom system didn't work, so she went to answer the door. As she opened it, Bardo pulled out a photo that she had sent to him and told her he was her biggest fan. She asked him to leave and closed the door. Bardo went away but then returned in a fury. He buzzed again, but remained hidden when she opened the door. That brought her across the threshold, and he burst out with a gun and shot her in the chest. Then he walked away. Schaeffer fell to the ground and died. Bardo later said that she had screamed, "Why? Why?"

Bardo boarded a bus and returned to Tucson. However, he'd told his sister of his intent to visit the actress, penning the note, "I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to eliminate what I cannot attain." When she heard about the murder, she contacted police to turn Bardo in. He was extradited to California where he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Something similar had happened to another actress in 1982, and in fact had inspired Bardo's plan. Arthur Jackson had seen Theresa Saldana in the movie Defiance and found himself hopelessly attracted to her. He decided to kill her, get caught, and get the death penalty so he could join her in death. He found her address through a detective agency that similarly got the address from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Jackson went to her home and when he saw her, he stabbed her 10 times, but a deliveryman intervened. She survived and Jackson was convicted of attempted murder. Yet he continued to send her threatening letters.

Schaeffer's murder and the Saldana case provoked Governor George Deukmejian to sign a law that prohibited the DMV from releasing addresses and inspired the Los Angeles Police Department to create the first Threat Management Team. Nationwide, stalking was taken more seriously and by 1993, all states, as well as Canada, put anti-stalking laws into effect. California's law was passed in 1990, effective on the first day of 1991. The law was the first of its kind and later helped to convict Jonathan Norman, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempting to carry out threats against director Steven Spielberg.

According to the legislation, a stalker is defined as "someone who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows or harasses another victim and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place the victim or victim's immediate family in fear of their safety." There must be at least two incidents to constitute the crime and show a "continuity of purpose" or credible threat. Another name for it is psychological terrorism, and it's all about the obsession with possession: If I can't have you, no one will.

[Cassie]

The "Material Guy"

Another celebrity stalking that tested the new California law in court was the case involving pop star Madonna. In May 1995, Robert Hoskins was arrested for stalking and making a terrorist threat against the singer. He was a homeless man who claimed that she was his wife, and when she rejected his proposals, he threatened to slice her throat from ear to ear. He also threatened to kill her bodyguards for coming between them and at one point he actually managed to get within 10 feet of her.

Hoskins scaled a wall that protected Madonna's Los Angeles residence and headed toward the courtyard. Basil Stephens, Madonna's bodyguard, spotted him and temporarily scared him away. Not to be intimidated, Hoskins returned the following day, only to encounter her personal assistant, Caresse Henry. Hoskins then made his threats. He wrote a note for Madonna on a religious tract entitled Defiled and left it for her at her call box at the gate. As presented by Rhonda Saunders in an article, "The Legal Perspective on Stalking," on one side it said:

"MaDNNA
To
Louise
Ciccone
I love you
Will
You
Be my
Wife
for
keeps
Robert
Dewey
Hoskins
over

Around those words he drew hearts, and on the other side he drew more pictures and wrote:

Im very
sorry.
Meet
me
somewhair.
Love for
keeps.
Robert
Dewey
Hoskins

In a circle, he wrote, "Be mind. And I'll be yours."

The contents of the religious tract discuss how people who wear inappropriate clothing should be punished and those who have sex outside marriage ought to be killed.

Henry contacted Stephens, who arrived to warn Hoskins once again. This time Hoskins was ready. He told the bodyguard that if Madonna did not marry him that very evening, he would slice her throat open. Stephens forced him to leave, but as he was doing so, Madonna came riding up on her bicycle. Hoskins failed to recognize her but gave her a frightening look. She learned about the threats and called the police, but they were unable to locate the man.

He didn't return the next day, or the next. They thought perhaps they were rid of him, but seven weeks later, Hoskins scaled the wall again. He ran into Stephens and went for his gun. Stephens was forced to shoot him and he was arrested.

The trial opened eight months later and Madonna was subpoenaed to testify about the trauma Hoskins had caused her. Being in court, she said, made her sick to her stomach. She had repeated nightmares of him actually getting into her home and finding her. According to California Deputy District Attorney Rhonda Saunders, the press made a comedy out of the ordeal, which undermined efforts to bring attention to the real dangers involved in such cases.

Stalking takes a psychological toll no matter who the target is, Saunders says. And even when jailed, the stalkers find ways to continue to threaten and frighten. Since they eventually get out, the victim must always worry about the stalker showing up again. Hoskins, in fact, has made such threats. He has only 10 years to serve, and even in prison, his obsession has not diminished. He insisted to the judge who saw him during an appeal that there is nothing wrong with him. He then threatened everyone who'd been involved in the case against him.

[Cassie]

Mr Hyde

Stalking is not limited to star struck admirers. Thomas McCarthy, 43, was a fireman, husband, and father of two children. His friends and coworkers liked him, but he had a terrible dark side that no one suspected. He had violent obsessive fantasies that compelled him to follow adult women of all ages, learn everything he could about them, keep lists, and sometimes act on his fantasies. He might watch a woman sign a check in a store and catch a glimpse of her address; he might go through her mail or garbage to get a phone number. He had all kinds of ways to get the information he needed to feed his fantasies about what he might do to a particular woman and how he might accomplish it.

After he was caught breaking into the home of Peggy Kilroy in Lakewood, Ohio, according to the arresting officers interviewed for "Inside a Stalker's Mind”, McCarthy told police he had stalked around 2,400 women. He had elaborate codes for what his target women looked like, and he might follow them for months, watching through their windows, learning their routes and routines, and even reading their records in doctors' offices where he cleaned aquariums after hours. What he wanted to do, he admitted later, was rape them, torture them, and cause them pain. One actual victim whose home he entered he subjected to bondage and a stun gun, another to the cut wires of an electrical fan. Although he went through several years of therapy and had even tried a drug that was supposed to diminish violent urges, nothing seemed to work. His fantasies and stalking behavior escalated.

Then in 1997, he spotted Peggy Kilroy in a supermarket and followed her home. He decided to break in one evening and rape her, but instead he encountered her brother, Brian, who subdued him and called the police. When he pleaded guilty to breaking and entering, he agreed to describe everything that he'd done and his detailed confession went on for two days. The detectives were stunned to realize the number of women that McCarthy had followed without any of them being aware of his activities. They had to wonder how many other women might be in the same predicament with as-yet-undiscovered stalkers like McCarthy.

In fact, says Dr. Phillip Resnick of Case Western Reserve University, one in 12 women is stalked at some point in her life - and men do not always do the stalking.

[Cassie]

Female Stalkers
I Know You Really Love Me bookcover
In her book, I Know You Really Love Me, psychiatrist Doreen Orion provides a terrifying account of her ordeal when a female patient developed an obsession with her. In fact, this is one of the professions most vulnerable to this kind of victimization. Orion had agreed to see "Fran" as a referral and for the next eight years lived entangled in a nightmare.

It began in 1989 in a psychiatric institute in Arizona, only a few months after Bardo had murdered Rebecca Shaeffer. Fran, 38, was sedated when Orion met her and showed the symptoms of a schizophrenic breakdown. She remained in the hospital for 16 days, admitting that she'd had several failed lesbian relationships (which turned out to have been prior stalking incidents). While under Orion's care, Fran developed a fixation. When released, she began to show up in places where Orion went, trying to get her attention. Orion soon discovered that Fran had been diagnosed with erotomania.

The psychiatric profession has only formally acknowledged the diagnosis of erotomania for the past two years in their standard diagnostic manual. In Fran’s case, she had developed a delusional belief that Orion or anyone else she targeted was in love with her and that they were meant to be together. No matter what the other person said, even if that person was married to someone else, the erotomaniac knew the "truth."

Generally the delusion becomes an obsession and even a form of harassment through phone calls, unwanted gifts, letters, and surveillance. Sometimes the obsession has fatal consequences. Orion soon realized with dismay that Fran had stalked half a dozen women before her. According to what she learned about the disorder, the typical person suffering from this delusion:

is single
is immature
is unable to sustain close relationships
has a history of obsessive attachments
gets attached to unattainable objects
attains these objects through fantasy
needs the fantasy in order to survive
mistakes feelings in the self for feelings in the other
has delusions that can last for years
will go to great lengths to rationalize why the object ignores them
may become predatory
seeks any acknowledgment, even negative, that makes them feel connected
has delusions that often develop after the loss of a meaningful connection
is devious about collecting information
usually requires forced separation from the object
Not all stalkers are erotomaniacs—only about 10 percent---but most erotomaniacs participate in some form of stalking.

Dr. Orion received letters and poems from Fran spelling out their psychic connection. Disturbed, she had no idea what to do about this behavior. Fran seemed to take hope in a variety of "signs," viewing everything as a means to remain attached. Orion failed to respond, hoping that would discourage Fran, but it didn't. Fran even sent a huge romantic Valentine's bouquet.

After a year, the messages became more violent in nature. One included a picture of a woman with her face severely beaten. After two years and several instances of trespassing, Orion took out a restraining order. For Fran, that meant that when she was arrested for violating the order and then appealed she managed to have a face-to-face confrontation in court. The legal process merely ensured that the stalker fulfilled her fantasy.

Orion did a great deal of research and came across another bizarre case, known as "the tunnel stalker." In that case, a woman named Mona was being stalked by a man whom she had met at a mall in Arizona. The woman thought that the man’s unwanted attentions would cease when she moved to another city. But the man, known as Stephen, not only found her but also invaded her new home. Stephen went underneath her bathroom floor through a grate and drilled a hole into the floor. He also hollowed out the vanity so he could fit inside. A maintenance man caught him crawling in and he was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. All the while, he insisted Mona would have to give him another chance.

Orion learned that, short of putting them in prison, the behavior of stalkers cannot be controlled. "Fran was a professional stalker," she said. "That was her job." But even if stalkers like Fran get prison time, their obsessions often resume upon release. Some of them move on to a new object, but some never quit until they die. One case went on for 31 years.

[Cassie]

Stalker Types
The Psychology of Stalking book cover
Dr. J. Reid Meloy, author of Violent Attachments and editor of The Psychology of Stalking, is an expert on stalking behavior. Pathological attachments, he says, most often occur in males and generally start in the fourth decade of their lives. It follows a fairly predictable progression:

After initial contact, the stalker develops feelings like infatuation, and therefore places the love object on a pedestal.
The stalker then begins to approach the object. It might take a while, but once contact is made, the stalker's behavior sets him up for rejection.
Rejection triggers the delusion through which the stalker projects his own feelings onto the object: She loves me, too.
The stalker also develops intense anger to mask his shame, which fuels the obsessive pursuit of the object. He now wants to control through harassment or injury.
The stalker must restore his narcissistic fantasy.
Violence is most likely to occur when the love object is devalued, as through an imagined betrayal.
Stalkers who are also psychopaths, Meloy says, experience only low levels of empathy or an absence of it altogether. Their relationships tend to be sadistic, based in power over others. He said he believes that this is associated with a lack of early attachment to others in the family. Meloy claims that psychopaths are biologically predisposed to antisocial activity because they have a hyper-reactive autonomic nervous system. Crime or exploiting others excites them. That means they're motivated to do things that heighten their nervous system and have no real conscience about hurting others.

The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that every year over a million and a half people are stalked, over two-thirds of them women. Ninety percent of women killed by husbands or boyfriends had first been stalked. One in 12 women and one in 45 men in the U.S. - about 10 million people - has been or will be stalked sometime in the future. . (Among celebrities and other high-profile people alone, one security company has amassed over 300,000 communications. )

While many stalkers only threaten harm, a small percentage carry out their threats, damaging property or harming pets. With the rise in popularity of the Internet, cyber-stalking has become yet another avenue of danger. Many stalkers have a prior criminal record and show evidence of substance abuse, a mood disorder, a personality disorder, or psychosis. At least half of all stalkers threaten their victims, which increases the possibility of violence. Frequency of violence averages 25 to 35 percent, with most violence occurring between people who have been romantically involved in the past.

The unrelenting harassment causes great emotional stress in the targeted victims. Some people lose their jobs or have to change their identity and move. They may suffer from extreme anxiety, sleep disorders and depression. Some consider suicide. If they have family members or children who are brought under the threat umbrella, they suffer even more from guilt and fear for the others. Even if these incidents get reported, restraining laws can do little against the verbal harassment. In fact some laws require that there be a genuine risk of danger or a pattern of incidents before formal protection is offered.

There's no easy way to predict who might become a stalker. It could be a former boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse; a fellow employee who has spotted his target in some casual encounter; a hostile neighbor; a video store clerk; and even a stranger who happens to have seen the victim on the street. Even people who were not abusive prior to their obsession can become so in the throes of it, because according to Janet S. Rulo-Pierson, a hospital counselor, they slowly exchange reality for an imaginary world that's more comforting and empowering.

Several stalker typologies have been developed, and according to Dr. Michael Zona and his colleagues from the University of Southern California School of Medicine, stalkers appear to come in three basic varieties, with a perverse twist on stalking that adds a fourth important category:

Simple obsessional
The most common form is male with a female with whom he was once sexually intimate.
Love obsessional
A love-obsessed stalker tends to idealize a celebrity or someone he has seen from afar and he develops an unrealistic belief that the target person will agree to a relationship.
Erotomania
Someone suffering from this more extreme obsession believes that the victim loves him or her.
False victimization
Claiming harassment and stalking when none exists, this behavior is usually carried on by people with histrionic personality disorders.
Another method of categorizing stalkers comes from the team who wrote the FBI's Crime Classification Manual:

Non-domestic stalker, who has no personal relationship with the victim
Organized (based in a calculated, controlled aggression)
Delusional (based in a fixation like erotomania)
Domestic stalker, who has had a prior relationship with the victim and feels motivated to continue the relationship; this constitutes around 60 percent of stalkers and the aggression often culminates in violence.
Stalkers tend to be unemployed or underemployed, but are smarter than other criminals. They often have a history of failed intimate relationships. They tend to devalue their victims and to sexualize them. They also idealize certain people, minimize what they are doing to resist, project onto people motives and actions that have no basis in truth, and rationalize that the target person deserves to be harassed and violated.

While many stalkers view their actions within a delusional framework and therefore see no need to get help, a few do actually approach professionals. One case resulted in a landmark decision that shifted certain responsibilities onto the shoulders of therapists.

[Cassie]

The Duty to Warn
University of California (Berkley) campus building
In the late 1960s, Prosenjit Poddar, a native of India, attended the University of California at Berkeley and met Tatiana Tarasoff at a dance. He developed a strong romantic interest in her. When they shared a quick New Year's Eve kiss, he believed it was a sign that they were engaged. Yet Tatiana's disinterest confused Poddar, so he persisted in believing that she in fact had feelings for him. He soon suffered an emotional breakdown and attempted to end all contact, but she called him to tell him how much she missed him. His obsessions returned and he believed he would have to kill Tatiana to end them.

Poddar sought outpatient psychiatric services at a hospital in Berkeley. The treating psychiatrist prescribed anti-psychotic medication, and then referred Poddar to a psychologist, Dr. Lawrence Moore, for counseling. Despite their sessions, Poddar persisted in his delusion that Tatiana would eventually love him. To prove his love, he purchased a handgun to orchestrate a life-threatening situation from which he could rescue her. Dr. Moore said that he might have to take steps to restrain Poddar, which sent Poddar angrily from his office.

Dr. Moore discussed this with colleagues and mentioned to the campus police that Poddar was threatening to kill a girl. Officers found him and thought he appeared rational, but eventually Poddar's delusions reached a breaking point. He went to Tatiana's house, armed with a knife and a pellet gun. She ran from him and he shot her and then stabbed her 14 times, killing her. Then he turned himself in. He was convicted of second-degree murder and was released after serving five years.

Yet this case had an impact on the relationship of psychiatry to stalking and violent obsessions. Where once what was said between doctor and patient was privileged, that was about to change.

The Tarasoffs instigated a civil case of negligence against the Regents of the University of California. In 1974, the California Supreme Court found that, despite confidentiality, a duty to warn exists when the therapist determines that a warning is essential to avert a danger rising from the patient's condition.

The mental health profession quickly responded that they have no inherent ability to predict violence and that such a ruling violated their "special" relationship. It would also hinder patients from trusting them, as well as generate false positive predictions as a means of diverting liability. Overall, this would be a detriment.

The court then issued a second opinion. They still found that therapists have a duty to potential victims, but they need only use "reasonable care" to protect the person. That is, the therapist may have to civilly commit or voluntarily hospitalize the patient to avoid the potential for harm, rather than actively warn a potential victim.

Most jurisdictions now recognize a Tarasoff-type duty, but some limit it to situations in which the patient communicates a serious threat of physical violence against an identifiable victim. Standards vary from state to state. However, there is no automatic duty to warn a potential victim, and in fact, issuing a warning has proven ineffective, because more violence has been shown to result after a warning than if no warning is issued. In any event, there are alternatives.

Yet with the advent of the Internet, a new type of anonymous stalking is creating many new dangers that are difficult, if not impossible, to prevent.

[Cassie]

Cyber-stalking
A 50-year-old former security guard used the Internet to punish a 28-year-old woman who had resisted his advances. He went into various chat rooms and impersonated her, putting out the message that she desired to be raped and offering her phone number and address. Men came to her door in the middle of the night to fulfill her fantasy. The security guard was arrested and pleaded guilty in April 1999 to one count of stalking and three counts of soliciting sexual assault. It was the first successful prosecution of cyber-stalking under a law that California had recently enacted against it.

The Web is an information and communication highway that connects millions of homes and offices around the world. People desperate for love may accept whatever they're told and be willing to meet. Sometimes this results in true love and marriage, sometimes in rape, sometimes in death, and sometimes in the initiation of stalking.

Dr. Robert Lloyd-Goldstein describes the case of a man and woman who communicated on America Online [AOL/Time Warner, which owns America Online is one of the owners of Courtroom Television Network] and arranged a meeting. The man immediately talked of marriage and children, which frightened the woman. She backed off, but he didn't. He sent e-mails, letters, and packages, and made numerous phone calls. When she still did not respond as he had planned, he threatened to make public details about her online. Then he began to show up where she worked, insisting that he was the perfect man for her and that she was turning his love into something "dark." When he sent an e-mail telling her quite specifically that he had stalked her, she was able to get the intervention of law enforcement.

Children are especially vulnerable to the encroachment of a stalker because they spend hours in chat rooms talking with strangers, tend to miss the signals of predatory deception, and may be seeking an innocent adventure. Often they're unaware of the true danger.

The most perilous areas are chat groups, message boards, and personal e-mail boxes, and the most common form of harassment online is done through threatening e-mail and live chats. Cyber-stalkers can spread rumors, post information about you, send a virus, or even draw you out for an offline (f2f) encounter.

While the laws governing cyberspace are just catching up to this problem, law enforcement has devised some ways to help protect kids.

Ray Cannup trolled the Web as "Dr. Evil," seeking young girls. He finally persuaded one to meet him in Virginia. When he arrived, however, it was no 13-year-old he met, but the police unit known as Operation Blue Ridge Thunder. Its members spend hours in chat rooms looking for such pedophiles and posing as children or potential buyers of child pornography to trap them in an illegal act. In this case, they were successful.

Online predators can be reported to the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children. Their cyber-tip hotline number is 800-The-Lost, or online at www.missingkids.com.

[Cassie]

Self Protection





Bookcover for The Gift of Fear
Gavin de Becker, a private consultant on security in southern California and author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence, offers services to a long list of celebrities. He believes that the media is partly responsible for the increased incidents of celebrity stalking since so much attention is focused on these people. He sees all the gifts, notes, and messages sent to the stars, from razors and half-eaten food to nude photographs and locks of human hair to flagrantly sexual items or body parts. There was even a letter that numbered over one thousand pages, and one person received a coyote's head. Some stalkers, such as the woman who broke into David Letterman's home, believe there's a relationship already intact.

Among the signals to beware of when a potential stalker approaches, according to de Becker are:

Forced teaming: He will try to get you to be a "we" with him in some predicament.
Charm, which usually has motive driving it. Be aware of the possibilities.
Too many details in some narratives indicate possible deception.
Loan sharking, or doing something to make you feel you owe him.
Unsolicited promises
Ignoring the word "no," through things like proposing alternatives}
De Becker has designed a computer program to help law enforcement analyze stalkers and their correspondences, yet unfortunately there's no good method yet for determining when the threat of violence will turn into a genuine danger.

Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatric consultant to the FBI and head of California's Threat Assessment Group, notes that an expressed desire for contact is more likely to lead to real contact. He notes that a stalker who threatens someone using specific dates or spells out a method of approach is more likely to carry out his threat than if the stalker left things vague. An enduring correspondence filled with threats was also something to take seriously, yet all predictions are based on probability, and a single threatening call or note is not to be ruled out.

It's difficult to protect yourself against a stalker, since the most casual encounter on the street may trigger the aggressor. It may be something you wear or the color of your hair, or just the fact that you were in a specific place on a specific date. One stalker told a woman that the fact that she was in the same bookstore as him on the anniversary of a European battle that captured his fancy meant that God had ordained their entwined destiny.

If a stalker comes into your life, there are certain safety precautions to take:

-Do not personally respond to the stalker's attention, not even to tell him (or her) to get lost. (People erroneously believe that a rational conversation will dissuade such people.)
-Beef up your home security and in the event of a threatening letter or call, alert your local police so they have it on record. (The local police will often give a free home security consultation.)
-Remove landscaping behind which someone can hide or keep surveillance.
-Keep detailed documentation of all actual contacts.
-If others witnessed an encounter, talk to them about testifying in court.
-Learn self-protection techniques, such as pepper sprays and self-defense skills.
-Keep a cell phone and an emergency number with you, and tell family and friends about any threat.
-Keep a pen and paper in your car to write down license numbers of cars following you.
-Alternate your routes.
- Research the legal remedies available in your state.
- If letters or calls persist, have an attorney send a registered cease-and-desist letter.
- Keep travel plans to a trusted few.
- In the event of actual trespass, get a restraining order.
- Inform security staff where you work about the problem.
- If you know what the stalker drives, give the description to friends and family.
- Keep a camera handy for photographic documentation.
- If you can afford it, install a surveillance camera.
- Install activity lights around your house that light up at night when someone walks close.
- Don't accept unexpected packages
- Identify people before opening a door.
- Seek therapy if you experience the symptoms of extreme anxiety.
- Avoid blaming yourself for the situation.
-Refrain from retaliation or counter-threats; the stalker is seeking {any} form of contact.
-Be sure that someone knows where you are going and when you are coming home.
-Try to go places with a friend or associate, especially health clubs and parking lots.
-Don't let the stalker rule your life.
- Prepare a safety kit with overnight items in the event you feel you need to leave your home and go to a hotel.
-Use caller ID and possibly get a second line with an unlisted number; then use the line on which he calls to record his harassment without him realizing that you're not using that phone.
-If it works for you, get a dog with a protective temperament.
-If you don't want to or know how to use a gun, assess your living space for possible defensive weapons and have them ready.
-Locate support groups, threat management groups, or hotlines that can offer specific strategies.
-Use a gender-neutral and non-provocative email address.
- Don't give out your Internet password and change it regularly.
- Use a chat network where harassment is not permitted.
-For Internet chats, use a different screen name than your email address.
-Don't give a lot of personal details to strangers.
-Be aware that stalkers can employ others to get information about you.