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Article Excerpt
Research in social psychology demonstrates that a range of factors affect how the general public perceive the seriousness of crime and how far people will attribute blame to the victim. Work on bystander intervention, for instance, has shown that the level of perceived intimacy between attacker and victim negatively correlates with the likelihood that aid will be offered to the victim of an assault (e.g. Shotland & Straw, 1976).
The 'Just World' hypothesis (Lerner, 1980) would explain these findings in terms of the attribution of blame. That is, a man who assaults his wife may be perceived as more 'entitled' to do so due to her past transgressions, but a stranger who makes a similar attack on a woman has no just entitlement because no history exists between the two. This article aims to discover whether the nature of the supposed former relationship between a stalker and victim impacted on perceptions of a typical case of stalking. The gender of both stalker and victim was also manipulated in order to examine whether male-female and female-male stalking were perceived differently.
Stalking has only recently been labelled as a criminal act, with California enacting the world's first anti-stalking legislation in 1990, and England and Wales outlawing all forms of harassment in 1997 (Protection from Harassment Act 1997). Stalking may be described as 'a constellation of behaviours in which one individual inflicts on another repeated unwanted intrusions and communications' (Pathe & Mullen, 1997, p. 12). A report commissioned by the US government asked a nationally representative sample of 8,000 women and 8,000 men about their experiences of stalking. They found that 1 in 12 women reported being stalked at least once, as did 1 in 45 of the men. Over half of women (59%) reported that they had been stalked by an ex-intimate, as did 30% of the men (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998). In the UK, the 1998 British Crime Survey (N = 9,988) estimated that 1 in 6 women and 1 in 15 men had been stalked since the age of 16. Ex-intimates were said to have stalked 30% of the women and 27% of the men (Budd & Mattins on, 2000). Mullen, Pathe, and Purcell (2000) state that the commonest stalking victim profile is that of 'a woman who has previously shared an intimate relationship with her (usually male) stalker' (p. 45).
Existing research would suggest that whilst ex-partners are more likely to be violent towards their victims than are acquaintance or stranger stalkers (e.g. Farnham, James, & Cantrell, 2000; Mullen, Pathe, Purcell, & Stuart, 1999; Palarea, Zona, Lane, & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, 1999), they are significantly less likely than strangers to be convicted for their stalking-related activities (e.g. Sheridan & Davies, 2001). A possible interpretation of this is that the sentencing of stalkers reflects the workings of the Just World hypothesis. The Just World hypothesis (Lerner & Simmons, 1966) posits that unjust situations are reinterpreted to ensure a belief in a controllable and 'just world'. In a just world, people 'get what they deserve' and therefore when we become aware of a person's fate, we assimilate new information and interpret it in accordance with these 'rules of entitlement'. Aspects of events, including personal attributes of the victim, will be construed so that the victim appears to 'deserve' their s uffering. Thus, the legal authorities may perceive that stalkers who are known to the victim have a greater 'entitlement' to harass them than those who share no prior history with their victim. This is despite the fact that ex-intimate victims of stalking are the group most likely to seek the intervention of the police and legal authorities (e.g. Mullen et al., 2000).
The perceived relationship between an attacker and their victim is a factor that may impact on bystander apathy towards witnessed assaults (e.g. Levine, 1999). Research into bystander intervention was inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. The aspect of this murder that horrified the world was the discovery that 38 of Kitty's neighbours witnessed the event, but none had responded, even by telephoning the police. The concept of the 'unresponsive bystander' was thus born, and soon after, Latane and Dailey (1969) began their investigation of the phenomenon. They suggested that bystanders take their cues from others to determine their own response, and that bystanders may also decide that it is not their responsibility to take action by aiding the victim (diffusion of responsibility).
Bystanders stated that they failed to intervene in Kitty Genovese's killing because they believed it to be a 'lovers' quarrel' (Rosenthal, 1964). Subsequent newspaper reports have suggested that even when the witnesses did not explicitly mention the possibility of an intimate relationship between attacker and victim, the descriptions they gave suggested a belief that a relationship existed (e.g. McFadden,...
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