By Linh Tat
Daily Bruin Staff
Educators and law enforcement agencies are concerned that too
many stalkers never get caught because victims don’t know how
to handle this non-traditional criminal offense.
Scott Gordon, deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County,
informed university employees during an anti-stalking program
Thursday how a case is legally recognized as stalking.
The difficulty with stalking cases is that victims do not always
recognize a potentially harmful incident when it occurs, Gordon
said.
“Stalking is not one big crime; it’s a series of
incidents that, taken by themselves, do not seem like a big deal,
but you must look at the picture as a whole,” Gordon
said.
Further complicating matters is that victims sometimes have
difficulty removing themselves emotionally from their stalkers
because in some cases they were once involved romantically.
In 61 percent of stalking cases, the victim was previously
married to or had dated their stalker, according to statistics from
the D.A.’s office.
“There aren’t that many crimes that start with the
words “˜I love you,'” Gordon said. “You
start with a wonderful relationship that goes wrong.”
In order for the D.A.’s office to recognize a case as
stalking, the incidents reported to police must meet all of the
following criteria: The victim must have experienced repeated
harassments; the stalker has made credible threats against the
safety of the victim or their immediate family and friends; and the
stalker’s actions were intended to scare the victim.
Gordon said victims should keep a log of each time the stalker
attempts to contact them. Rather than deleting an unopened e-mail
or erasing a message from the answering machine, he said the victim
should turn the information in to police.
“Documentation is key. The more you can save the
better,” he said.
The program was part of a “Love Me Not”
anti-stalking campaign headed by the D.A.’s office and the
Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women.
“This … new anti-stalking collaboration uniting
prosecution, law enforcement and education is the first program of
its kind in the nation,” L.A. District Attorney Gil Garcetti
said in a statement.
“(It combines) expertise from all available resources in a
single place to provide multifaceted assistance to victims and to
deter stalkers by raising awareness of the criminally punitive
consequences of their behavior,” Garcetti said in the
statement.
Thursday’s program was sponsored by various campus
organizations, including the Women’s Resource Center, Student
Psychological and Legal Services, and the Office of the Dean of
Students.
Violence in the workplace, one of the program’s main
concerns, is most common at a large organization such as UCLA,
Gordon said.
Drawing correlations between domestic and workplace violence,
Gordon said that victims who leave their abuser often find the
latter looking for them at their workplace.
With the growing use of the Internet, university officials have
also seen a marked increase in cyberstalking cases.
“The problem with computers is that you don’t
realize who you’re talking to,” said Tina Oakland,
director of the WRC.
“People tend to feel more comfortable about giving out the
more intimate details of themselves over the computer because they
feel anonymous,” she continued. “We encourage students
to monitor the content and amount of information they share with
strangers.”
The average age of stalkers is 38 years and more than half of
the victims are between 18 and 29 years old, according to the
D.A.’s office.
Oakland said plans are under way to create a threat assessment
team made up of members from various organizations to determine
what course of actions are best for individual stalking cases.