I’ve Had a Cyberstalker Since I Was 12 (2016)
wired.com
wired.com
A lot of the (non-technical) internet users probably don't know how easy it can be to link an online identity to your person, be it through handle (nickname) re-use or simply having a pattern of likes and dislikes or hanging out with the wrong crowd. Once the connection is made you have nothing left to shield yourself with and will have to, like the person in this article, deal with it on a daily basis.
I've since grown up a little, grown a thicker hide and conquered my paranoia to a degree thanks to therapy, and have started to comment and share online again but the fear of coming across the wrong person with too much time on their hands still feels chilling to me.
Garry Newman (the guy behind "Garrys Mod" and "Rust" (game)) published[1] a rather interesting chain of emails, a peek in to the mind of his stalker.
As-is, any time you log into Facebook, anyone who is friends with you can see that you are active in the Messenger bar on the right-hand side (even if you have chat disabled). This gives stalkers (who, as the article explains, are sometimes best not blocked) an excuse to message you, to which a victim will feel pressured to respond. This makes Facebook a very unpleasant place to be.
I personally have written a Chrome extension to hide my presence. Facebook, please ALLOW USERS TO HIDE PRESENCE if you want to make a positive impact against stalking.
While this is true, users have the power to change this dynamic. If the statement "Facebook promotes stalking behaviours by refusing to implement an invisible mode to help protect victims" (whether true or not) is accepted as common knowledge, for example, then that can change things.
It is accurate to say that they presumably must not have a business case, they're a private company and they can do what they like. This does not contradict others promoting a particular opinion in what they should do, because that has the power to create the business case for doing it.
If you don't want a person to see that you are online, just remove the person..or even better, don't add the person in the first place. If you join a service made for sharing personal data you should at least think about the consequences.
Facebook is indeed a major part of the problem which you just described. They hold a 'real name' policy, and have well-crafted call to actions which pressure people into feeling obliged to share information. The entire service is designed to mine data from you, which is a bonus for a stalker.
Though I don't feel your suggestions - 'just removing or never adding them in the first place' - is a bit moot when the author has described exactly why the person is on their list..
Just leaving this here as a kind of PSA: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/not-really-r...
Of course, of course, most people are not like that. But most of us females have run into one or the other, and one is enough.
edit: What I mean is, if you know the feeling of being nice due to intimidation, then you can easily see why people probably even smaller and weaker than you and of increased interest to a broader range of the population might be.. well, nice, as long as they can.
I sometimes meet people, most (all?) of them women, who were not nice to one idiot groping them and woke up in the hospital. Though that are the ones talking about it, which certainly gives a bias. Smile, make yourself small and maybe they go away. Better strategy compared to confronting them most of the time. Is that also true in your case? (Honest question.)
This is awful advice. The article itself is about a series of events where implied refusals culminated over time. An early civilised but clear decline is safer and more effective. I've done what you advise in my early teens in a nexus of bullying (and more) situations and all I've got has been more suffering. You'd rather get beaten up than having such an experience, believe me.
> I sometimes meet people, most (all?) of them women, who were not nice to one idiot groping them and woke up in the hospital.
In Europe? I suppose it's possible in some pathological neighborhoods but I would be surprised to hear it's a common occurrence. But then, I guess, once per lifetime is dangerous enough, as you say.
1 Cole - Children's spontaneous control of facial expressions - Child Development (1986), Saarni - An observational study of children's attempts to monitor their expressive behavior - Child Development (1984)
2 Politeness: Some universals in language usage (1987), Leaper and Ayres: A meta-analytic review of gender variations in adults' language use, Personality and Psychology Review (2007)
3 Campbell - Staying Alive: Evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999)
https://news.yale.edu/2003/03/18/women-smile-more-men-differ...
As a dude, I get told to smile pretty frequently. I don't think this has anything to do with sex most of the time (though there are sexists, obvs).
I don't have citations at hand, but I have seen some studies that suggest that adults treat boy babies and girl babies differently from the get go. So just because the behavior can be traced to infancy does not prove it is genetic.
>In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture
So what happened?
Did the author's father verify this was indeed a real lawyer?
Did the author contact her own lawyer to help figure out what circumstances could result in a cyberstalker's lawyer saying this to her father?
I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened that I won't explain further and perhaps that will wrap things up."
Because this is what happened so far.
> that I won't explain further
You can't explain things you don't understand. The article says:
I emailed the lawyer back, but due to attorney-client privilege he wouldn’t reveal the nature of his representation of Danny. I assumed, however, that he was being sued by another victim.
> and perhaps that will wrap things up."
Yes.
But you can follow up on them, especially in an article where the first-person account is part of a larger story about cyberstalking.
E.g., "We then contacted a lawyer who specializes in stalking, who told us that..."
E.g., "I emailed the professor mentioned earlier in the article to find out if criminal/civil settlements ever result in such an arrangement in cyberstalking cases."
Or, "While the lawyer couldn't reveal the nature of his relationship with Danny, I certainly was under no such obligation. We hired a private investigator to go through the records I had kept of the cyberstalking and harassment, to try to piece together who other potential victims may have been."
If this were a blog I wouldn't have commented at all. I can understand if the author took the call from the lawyer as a potential signal that the harassment was over and wishes to devote 0 more time going forward to dealing with this person. But it's not a blog-- it's a journalistic story about a person using every legal avenue available to stop the harmful behavior of an abuser that spanned decades, and how every single avenue fell short of stopping the abuse. That story is frustratingly incomplete because we don't know what it is that actually put a stop to the abuse, and it appears nobody took further steps to explain it.
Edit: added word "journalistic" for clarification
I'm interested in what steps were necessary to force a lifetime harasser to find a lawyer and a) agree to provide that lawyer with at least a partial list of victims of his online attacks, and b) also agree to allow the lawyer to contact the family of those victims and request a response if the lifetime harasser ever tries to contact the victim again.
In some countries you just get a non-molestation order. Breaching that order is a criminal act.
That's much harder to do in the US because of 1st amendment and "prior restraint" - even if it's possible the stalked person faces expensive and lengthy court cases.
possibly preceded by 0) hire private investigator to find stalker's actual identity
[1] http://www.womenslaw.org/simple.php?sitemap_id=90#2
anyone with experience of how effective (or not) this might be?
Also: it would suck to have to spend money on something like that. Some random asshole of a stranger impacting your budget and savings? Maybe not as violating as the stalking itself, but certainly an insult added to the injury.
That should be the other way around, no? The financial damage is injurious whereas the stalking (like an insult) has mere psychological impact.
Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don't write articles like this.
Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don't write articles like this.
I will posit that most stalkers fit the profile of a sociopath. Most of their victims probably do not. Trying to figure out how to think enough like a sociopath to outwit them if you, yourself, are not innately wired that way can be distasteful. But, if you don't, your efforts to manage the situation wind up either ineffectual or backfiring or both.
In this article, it says she did things like told him to stop sending so many messages or she would block him. When he didn't do as she asked, she blocked him. The result: It just made things worse.
This seems to be the usual pattern. The victim often tries tactics that just deepen the problem.
It gets to a point where politeness has nothing to do with it. If everything you try just makes the problem worse, trying to just not antagonize the creep can seem like the least worst option possible.
But yes, I get that some people are socialized in counterproductive ways. Maybe there's a market for enforcement services to help such victims. Reputable providers would, of course, verify claims of potential clients. On the other hand, IANAL. And there might well be liability for defamation.
I frequently try to talk about what women and other oppressed groups can do differently. I am routinely accused of victim blaming because of it, so I am aware that this is a hard thing to talk about effectively. But some of the problems here are:
1) If you are male and she is female, she may do the exact same things you did and not the get the results you got.
2) It sounds like you were probably an adult when you ran into this issue. She was just 12 when she met Danny.
3) She had known him a lot of years before it became apparent that he was a problem.
There are no doubt other problems with it. If you want to talk about better approaches and what targets of stalkers can do differently, I am up for that. But I am not really interested in "agreeing" that because you solved it yourself, she just must not have tried hard enough or something.
The reality is that while some responses to such people or situations tend to be more effective than others, if someone decides to target you, you may be unable to dissuade them from continuing to do so. In many cases, stalkers do not stop until they are dead. To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real way to put a stop to their behavior. And if you do so, the odds are really high you will go to jail. Most people would rather just keep trying to avoid the lunatic than go to jail.
Furthermore, abusive husbands who finally beat their wife to death do less prison time on average than abused wives who finally defended themselves with lethal force. Part of the reason for this is that men tend to have both a size and strength advantage over women, and it is also not uncommon for them to have an advantage of skill from having taken martial arts or served in the military. So, women very often need to pick up an equalizer and preplan it to have any hope of successively winning the battle. Thus, abusive men are very often charged with manslaughter and their victims are very often charged with premeditated murder in cold blood.
Thus, if you are a woman and some man decides to victimize you, you may find yourself in a situation that is simply shitty as hell no matter how you choose to handle it.
That fact needs to be acknowledged up front before talking about "well, what can the victim do to try to de-escalate such things before they become so entrenched?" And you seem to be in a head space where you think the victim can just do a thing and magically make it go away. This is often not the case at all, even if they are really savvy about handling shitty social situations.
> It looks to me like you are saying "Well, I was able to handle it myself, so she is just a loser that she couldn't."
Sorry if it comes off that way. I did manage to handle it. But it took months of tedious work. Yet I didn't mind, because I was extremely angry about it. And I knew that I was learning stuff that would be useful later.
I'm not saying that she's a loser. I'm saying that she was socialized to be nice. To find aggression distasteful, as you said. I do strive to be peaceful, and I seek peaceful friends. But unfortunately, entirely nonviolent and peaceful people can end up as victims.
So what can victims do? Going to authorities doesn't seem to work very well. Filing a lawsuit, as Hatena did against Hill, is expensive. That's why I floated the idea of private enforcement. Rather like PIs that take direct action against attackers. Instead of doxxing attackers personally, as puellavulnerata and I did, victims could hire consultants to manage it.
To avoid liability, there could be "Assassination Politics" type services. Attackers typically have multiple victims, so there would be multiple contributors. Who would, of course, be kept anonymous. The front end could be an easy-to-use app. And the service would be compartmentalized, with staff who verify allegations being fully anonymous, and firewalled fully from anonymous staff who handle action against attackers.
> To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real way to put a stop to their behavior.
Well, the first draft of my first post in this thread did include a sentence about having a group of friends with baseball bats pay this jerk a visit ;) But arguably, measures well short of death will stop most stalkers. Shaming to family and friends often does it. Or trashing their career, as puellavulnerata did. My stalker was a well-respected academic, and he was utterly freaked when I confronted him at his university email address.
I posted a link elsewhere in this thread suggesting that women need to learn to give pushback sooner rather than later. That is in the category of trying to not let yourself become a victim to begin with.
If you do become the target of something like this, well, it gets a lot more complicated. Your idea about shaming to family and friends is not necessarily effective. In the past, I have been moderately harassed online by a man who alternated between verbally feeling me up and verbally assaulting me. Any time he verbally felt me up, his girlfriend would attack me in some other discussion on the same forum. I complained to the mods. They saw no reason to intercede on my behalf.
Horrible people often have friends who are either horrible themselves or basically a good pawn. It is not unusual for a romantic interest to treat the object of desire as if they are intentionally being temptresses. There are complex reasons behind that.
But, yes, contacting them at work or implying/threatening that you will make it public in a way that materially harms them can be useful. If it is ugly enough, making it clear that you understand you can't win, but you can make them lose harder can be a useful way to get some breathing room.
But all of that requires you to understand what they want from you in specific and from life in general. Victims are often emotionally warm people with a lot of empathy. Coming to terms with how cold hearted, callous, manipulative, uncaring horribly assholes stalkers really are is an uncomfortable process for such people. Some of them will fail to get it through their thick skull because they would literally rather believe the world is a nice place and people are really good at heart than to let their delusions of that sort be destroyed by coming to terms with the truth of their situation.
And that is probably a rather muddled, hand-wavy comment. My heart isn't really in this discussion today.
Best.
I can only vaguely imagine that. I mean, I'm friendly and empathic enough. But I also have a short temper, and tend toward keeping grudges.
And about stalkers. They aren't necessarily cold hearted, callous, manipulative, and uncaring. Sometimes they're just unconsciously selfish and childish. I know because I've been there. I lusted for a close friend, for years. But she just wasn't interested. And yet, we apparently remained friends through it all. Later, I learned that her thesis adviser was harassing her sexually. And I got that I'd been a jerk, to not see it, and to be another problem for her.
People should not have to use other means - apart from maybe if they feel confident to do so saying please stop+ (as this complainant did). They should be able to rely upon the rule of law to deal with harrasesment. If legislation/case law is not sufficient at the moment then legislation should be reviewed and if possible changed (rather than putting someone through the extended process of a precedent setting court case). Other means should be opposed as well on a rule of law basis.
+ Not sure about this I shouldn't have to ask a person hitting me to please stop... but hitting is illegal already sending messages is not...
Regarding human stalkers.
What to do.. mmh.. how about building a trojan-persona? You hook NN-Chatbots behind all your profiles on your online persona- ready to speak even with the stalk and sneak out in the middle of the night? You tell your friends in person about your new low_profile and that stalker is off chasing maschinery.
No victim blaming here, but be clear and confront the guy. I guess making beyond shadow of a doubt clear that you don't ever want to hear from him again under any terms is about the only thing you can legally do. Wishy-washy communication is in my opinion really the wrong way to deal with pushy men. The slightest wavering means "yes" to some guys.
Stalking is very common. Rarely stalkers will murder their victims. It's not easy to tell the difference between the annoying but not murdering stalkers and the murdering stalkers.
So confronting them carries a small but real risk of severe harm.
There's also not much evidence that confrontation works to stop stalking.
> The slightest wavering means "yes" to some guys.
This is incorrect. To these people anything will be twisted into "yes".
"I don't want you to contact me again. If you make any further contact I will contact the police, and you will be in violation of the court order I have against you" will be interpreted to fit the delusion, perhaps "in truth she still loves me, and wants to be with me, but her husband has manipulated her into saying this stuff."
Tldr ratioanilty doesn't work with irrational people.
Most people these days are completley blind to the possible consequences of sharing personal data with others.
It seems like most people used to be very careful with sharing personal information online, but in the last 15 years many people have clearly forgotten about common sense.
2000: It's the internet, it's dangerous to put your name there. 2017: I have to share a bunch of photos of myself(so people have something to edit), lists of all my connections(so people knows who to contact), my current location(so people knows where to find me) and I need to have 25 open communication channels. Oh, and it should be available to more or less everyone.
Last week I actually heard a person complaining about a stalker messaging her on facebook, blocking didn't help as he just created a knew account. I guess most of the users here sees a simple solution, but most people have no idea what they are doing online.
TLDR answer is: To defend against a stalker you will likely need legal advice and representation.
This is distasteful and expensive, and judgment is required to decide when to take that step. I am not a litigious person, and generally prefer to avoid conflict, or negotiate reasonable solutions. A stalker will take advantage of this. Stalkers (at least mine) operate by asserting control gradually, and retaliating against your attempts at self defense in a tit-for-tat fashion.
I think it likely that if you have even considered seeking legal redress, it's probably already time to hire an attorney. The cost and risk of civil cases or lawsuits is generally much smaller then the cost/risk of potentially getting involved in a criminal case later, so if you can solve the problem in civil court, it is highly desirable to do so.
The police may arrest and charge one (or both) of you if they respond to an in progress assault. However, they will not want to evaluate contradictory factual claims made by you and the stalker about things that happened while they weren't there. When you ask for help, they will probably encourage you to obtain a restraining order, which makes the problem someone else's job for now, and sets at least a low bar for complainants, before the police have to get involved.
Your legal position in the future will be constrained by early decisions and statements that you make. The article describes this question from a police officer: “'Were you ever afraid for your life?' he asked, still apparently on my side."
In my state, fear of one's life or safety was a legal requirement for obtaining an ex parte domestic violence civil restraining order. Think very carefully in advance about how to answer questions like this and don't ever lie to anyone or change your story. Lawyers are required to tell a judge if you do, and you will also need to protect your reputation with people you know against claims made by the stalker. Your only advantage over the stalker is truthfulness and consistency.
A civil restraining (or "protective") order is issued by a civil court which orders one party to stay away from another, possibly along with other provisions . Ex parte means "without the other party's presence." Some states (including mine at the time) allow such an order to be issued without an adversarial hearing. You obtain this by: going to court clerks office and submitting the paperwork they give you. Soon, (because this is presumed to be an emergency) you are given a short hearing in which you must explain why you are afraid for your life, and what's happed so far. If the judge grants the order, the respondent will be served a paper copy of the order by an officer, who will explain to the respondent that it's a crime to approach or bother you while the order is in force. These orders are short (mine was 21 days) because the respondent is not allowed an advance adversarial hearing.
After being served, my stalker retaliated by obtained an ex parte restraining order against me. I have come to understand that this is not uncommon in states where reciprocal orders are allowed. Eventually, after some stalling, I was granted a hearing and that order was dismissed at my request. Ultimately, after many further hearings over the course of about a year, I was granted a long term civil restraining order. During the litigation I dropped my college courses, resigned from my internship, and finally transfered to a university in another town. I did this partly because it was advised by my attorney, but mainly because I wanted to move on with my life.
It was also my experience that other people tended to trivialize the problem. It was hard for some people to understand that simply ignoring the stalker would not make it possible for me to attend work, or class, or use public spaces. My stalker would wait for me outside of my school and workplace, hold the doors shut, and threaten to report an assault if I tried to get in. They would also follow me in public or into businesses and create disruptions by yelling, making false reports to police or security, or other authority figures. The goal seemed to be to deny access to a space and/or provoke a physical altercation so I could be charged with assault.
I got out of this for a few thousand in attorney fees (plus a year of my life), and was never injured or charged with a crime. If I had not hired an attorney, I think there is a chance I would have been injured, killed or imprisoned. There were some peculiar features of my case that probably make it exceptional, so I'm not sure how well my advice generalizes, but this is it: Don't engage with the legal system without a lawyer, and don't wait to start defending yourself.
Thanks for reading it.
That's not to detract from your suffering - I am sorry to hear of your terrible experience at the hands of this creepy, awful woman. I hope you get this resolved somehow.
At this time, we cannot possibly separate out what is the result of biological wiring and what is the result of how people are socialized. There seems to be some evidence that as women gain power and social status and so forth, they start exhibiting some of the same negative traits that are deemed to be stereotypically male.
It may not be that women are more virtuous. It may just be that women get enormously more social pressure to curb certain tendencies, or at least hide them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression#Testosterone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid#roid_rage
Then again, there's a lot of crazy people out there...
I just don't post images and dumped social media except for some random accounts unrelated to RL. (i.e. HN)
Could this be gamifying it for the stalker? Like a rat in a maze and you're the cheese?
Just wondering what kind of responses or techniques could break them out of it, like setting up 10's or even 100's of decoy accounts for them to go for and after enough false leads they're discouraged because the effort vs response or cost/benefit ratio is too slanted towards zero return? Perhaps that would just make them all the more encouraged to find the real you.
Okay.
> Thanks for reading it.
Please don't attach that. It would be different if you were thanking a specific person that had replied. But this is directed at the general public, and they can't read it anymore, so thanking them 'for reading it' comes across pretty unpleasantly.
I definitely don't think the woman owes him an answer or anything else of course, but I do think that women have a different perspective than men in general where they often have many more suitors and don't really understand the male experience that well. From the perspective of a man who has few prospects who takes every interaction as being meaningful, being abruptly blocked by someone with no explanation seems very rude and personal, but to the woman doing the blocking it might simply be the most convenient and reasonable way to deal with being approached quite often. It wasn't until I became platonic friends with women that I realized just how much more popular they are on dating sites, etc.
The guy then switches to insults and threats. Going from there and explaining it away with "oh, poor guy, might have felt rude and personal to him" is quite the stretch.
The guy is an active stalker. Let's stop making excuses for horrible behavior. He's not "confused". He's malicious. He's threatening. He's trying to destroy her livelihood.
It's not women "having a different perspective than men", it's men like you continuing to make excuse after excuse for men who behave like sociopaths.
"Danny" is obviously mentally disturbed and should not represent the rest of the male population.
Normal men do not act like Danny.
You can't explain writing emails impersonating someone simply as result of "chemical imbalances in the brain" (except if you reduce every kind of human behavior to that, but then the phrase "chemical imbalance" does not explain anything). Brains and their chemical imbalances are much older than the technology of emails, or even writing.
I have had some experiences with women where things seemed to be going fine and then I was abruptly blocked or ignored, and it was very frustrating at the time because I had poor social skills and I didn't have a good understanding of what had happened or why. Now I understand that dating is often asymmetrical and one person just may have many more options than the other, or just decide they are not interested, and that's OK.
This seems like it could be a very extreme case which got way out of hand and the guy went off the deep end, but I think it is best to at least try to have some understanding of and maybe some empathy for both sides.
I think the same thing can happen to women who are pursuing men, and it can also become extreme, like the woman who broke into David Letterman's house. Should you just call her a creep and throw her in prison, or should you feel empathy for her mental illness and try to treat it? It seems to me like the best solution is to determine and treat the actual cause of the behavior.
I did not read the root comment as an excuse, but rather an attempt at understanding what kind of twisted psychology would lead into this kind of horrible stalking behavior. Most often, people are not consciously driven by some kind of desire to be evil just for evilness' sake.
If the Hollywood romance concepts like "persistence will lead to romantic happiness" is a partial reason how people can rationalize this kind of behavior, that's an issue that hopefully can be tackled.
Thanks for reading it.
The guy was clearly a creep who doesn't deserve any sort of relationship with her, or indeed anyone else who he is being weird, unpleasant and threatening towards.