Traumatised by my stalker

TWENTY-two-year-old Latoya J didn’t think twice about exchanging her number with Robert when they met at a social gathering three months ago. He seemed okay and wanted her advice on a new venture which she felt she could assist him with.

Initially, Robert would just call to ask for her advice, but it wasn’t long before the nature of the calls began to take on a different spin. “He would call me late in the evenings and started leaving some weird voicemails on my phone,” she told All Woman.

“He would tell me I was a really lovely lady and a nice girl and that he wanted to be with me,” she said.

But her refusal to entertain the idea of a more intimate relationship further fuelled his interest and he went beyond just calling her, to showing up at the school where she volunteered her time. “At one point, he would just show up at the door looking in and I was advised by the teacher that he wanted to join the class,” recounted the young lady.

“He just started lurking around and it was very scary,” she said. Her boyfriend and mother got involved then and asked Robert to stay away but to no avail, and he continued showing up at the places where she hung out. One such place was at the rehearsals for her singing group where he approached the director to ask if he could join.

When she refused to take his calls, he would leave explicit voicemails describing the extent of his love for her, and when she told him she was only interested in being his friend, he got extremely angry.

“At one point he left a voicemail saying, ‘you say I cannot get you but I can get you; you say I cannot touch you, but I can touch you; and that he wants us to have a family and he loves me,” she said.

Latoya has since filed a report at a police station and even asked one of her friends who is a police officer to intervene. But in both cases, within mere hours of being warned, Robert would come back to taunt her. Other male friends and even her father have warned him to stay away, but the phone calls got worse instead of better, prompting her to change her SIM card.

Psychiatrist Dr Anthony Allen says this form of stalking is called erotomania and is a form of delusional disorder where an individual holds firm to the belief that someone has a liking for them but is not necessarily making it known.

The doctor explained that stalking can also be linked to a psychosis like paranoid schizophrenia, or might be due to a very insecure personality.

“The person might not believe that they have the ability to form usual relationships, but they can tolerate admiring somebody from a distance and what can result from this is that they can develop a fixation. That particular person may be somebody who reminds them of their mother or some significant female person,” he said. “So they may call to be able to hear the person’s voice and may develop fantasies, even sexual fantasies, when they hear the person’s voice, or they may look on the person and have fantasies as well of intimacy and sexual fantasies of closeness. From afar they try to gratify their urges so to speak,” the psychiatrist explained.

The doctor said the stalker’s delusions might be fuelled by the kind act of a stranger who later becomes his victim. In fact, the doctor said he has had patients who were stalked because they assisted someone on a bus, for example.

“To a rational mind, it’s really difficult to fathom why they would choose that person as a target. But in the mind of someone who is psychotic or extremely insecure, who lives in a fantasy world, they may view you in such a warped or unrealistic way,” he said.

It is for this reason that the psychiatrist warns individuals to be very careful about sharing personal information such as their telephone numbers and their home and work address with someone they are meeting for the first time. Although none of his patients caught in this situation have ever been physically hurt, he believes it is unwise to take chances with a delusional person.

“It can be dangerous because it can go to the extent where because the person is so insecure, and especially if they are psychotic, they may be vulnerable to feeling extreme rage if they are rejected. In their desire to be with the person, sometimes even to possess the person in an irrational way, they may escalate their efforts at stalking and if they are further rejected they may unleash their anger and rage on the victim, so the person has to be very security conscious,” he said.

But even though some stalkers might not resort to physical harm, the psychological impact caused to the victims can be just as unpleasant.

“It gives you a pins and needles kind of feeling and it makes you feel on edge, especially when you want closure. It’s not something that I would want my enemies to go through,” said Latoya.

While most young people were out enjoying themselves over the Emancipation weekend, she stayed home, immobilised by fear and desperately wanting to sleep, but feeling compelled to stay awake so she can listen to the voicemails left by her stalker, which might give a clue to his next move.

“I cannot live my life like this, in terms of people always having to be with me. I am just tired of this, I just want my life back,” she pleaded, voice laced with desperation.

Thankfully, her stalker doesn’t know where she lives or works, but that’s little consolation to her, as he seems to always be with her.

Dr Allen believes stalkers generally lack empathy which means the hurt their behaviour causes their victims means very little to them. The best recourse for these victims he believes is to file a restraining order which would legally bar the stalker from coming within a certain distance of them, but he wishes more could be done to address the issue.

“I think the police need to take this issue of stalking extremely seriously. Your rights are being ignored and are being threatened,” said the doctor.

But detective sergeant Hemford Wade from the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA) said with no legislation in place to address stalking, there is very little the security forces can do.

“There is nothing in our law that would cause him to be arrested for this offence, so this is something that we need to revisit and have something in law to prevent these things from happening or to make it a criminal offence where they can be prosecuted for doing this. For the time being, the only thing the police can do now is to warn these persons, just to stay away,” he said.

He said most cases of stalking he has seen so far involve an ex-boyfriend trying to get back with his partner or a man stalking a woman he is meeting for the first time. Either way, he said, “it is a quite frightening experience most of the time.”

His advice to the victim is to go to the courts and get a summons which can be served on the accused who would then be taken to court where a judge or a justice of the peace can try the person for the threat.

When contacted, senior Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Lisa Palmer-Hamilton also bemoaned the lack of a legislation to make stalking a criminal offence. However, under the common law, a stalker can be put before the court for harassment.

“That is clearly something that our legislation needs to deal with, but for now, there can be an action brought in the civil courts with respect to the harassment and an injunction sought. If the injunction is breached, then it would be criminal, because it would be a contempt of court procedure,” she said

“You would not be successful with the injunction in isolation, it would have to come first with the harassment and the precedence for that is laid down in the case of Senior versus Allen in 2005-2006,” she pointed out.

In that particular case, the plaintiff and her father were able to get an injunction against the harasser and due to the trauma caused by the harassment, also sought compensation for damages. But despite that success, she wants policymakers to start looking into making stalking a criminal offence which can be prosecuted.

“I believe that our legislators need to address that, because it is something that is happening on a frequent basis and clearly if we don’t want to get it to the point where we have to now bring action under domestic violence — because sometimes it can be as a result of domestic violence why there is stalking — it can be a prelude to domestic violence and it can exist on its own. We certainly don’t want it to get to a point where there is physical injury or death which can be a spin-off from it,” she said.

For her part, attorney-at-law and president of Woman Inc, Dundeen Ferguson, believes that the issue of stalking is not being dealt with the level of seriousness that it deserves.

“I have been talking about it with the NGOs because we have several women who are dealing with it and who are being stalked by their ex-husbands and it is very traumatic,” she said.

“I remember in the ’90s a young girl wrote the centre and I asked the police what they could do because she was on the verge of committing suicide,” the gender advocate recounted. It turned out that not much could be done since stalking isn’t a criminal offence.

While she believes getting an injunction from the court does assist to an extent, she too wants to see stalking criminalised. She said she hopes to continue the discussion on the matter to see how this can come into effect.