January is National Stalking Awareness Month.

According to a 2014 CDC study, 7.5 million people are stalked each year in the United States. Fifteen percent of women and 6% of men will experience stalking in their lifetime (Breiding, 2014).

Seventy-six percent of women killed by an intimate partner had been stalked prior to their murders. Fifty-four percent of those women had reported their stalking to police (McFarlane, 1999).

Victims of stalking tend suffer more from anxiety, insomnia, social dysfunction, and severe depression when compared to the general population. The victims had more symptoms of psychopathology when the stalking was more severe, according to a study conducted in the Netherlands (Blaauw, 2002).

I’ve barely scratched the surface on this topic. I haven’t even tried to look into information related to social media.

Stalking: Know it. Name it. Stop it.

Eric Blaauw, et al., “The Toll of Stalking: The Relationship Between Features of Stalking and Psychopathology of Victims,” Journal on Interpersonal Violence, 17, No. 1 (2002): 50-63.

Matthew J. Breiding, et al., “Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization – National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011”, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Morality Weekly Report, Vol. 63, No. 8 (2014).

Judith McFarlane, et al., “Stalking and Intimate Partner Femicide,” Homicide Studies 3, No. 4 (1999).