For more than a month, a young woman in Stratford, N.J., was hounded by a man she had briefly dated. He followed her to work and to the hairdresser. He left repeated messages on her answering machine. She talked to the police several times and filed a harassment complaint, but there was little the police could do except ask the man to stop.
"Our hands were tied," said Jay Wilkins, a detective in the Stratford Police Department. "We were in the position of waiting for a crime to happen."But earlier this year, law enforcement officials in New Jersey got a new tool for handling such cases with the signing of a state law making stalking a crime. The day after the bill was signed, Wilkins arrested the man.
New Jersey is the latest state to define stalking and make it a crime to follow, harass or threaten another person. In 1990, after the much-publicized slaying of Rebecca Schaeffer, an actress in the television series "My Sister Sam," California became the first state to pass a stalking law. Now 31 states have such laws.
"Stalking is going to be the issue of the '90s," said Cheryl Tyiska, the director of victim services at the National Organization for Victim Assistance in Washington.
"It's a big problem, and it's going to take some time to change the mind-set of judges, prosecutors and police, so they take women's complaints seriously."
The criminal justice system has long had to deal with obsessed former husbands, deranged fans and spurned girlfriends. But as long as there was neither a name for it nor a legal remedy, stalking remained a largely hidden phenomenon, of concern only to the families involved and to those who ran shelters for victimized women. Police officers, who often heard desperate pleas for protection from stalkers, had little help to offer.
Despite extensive publicity about a few celebrity cases, stalking is usually a problem for women involved in intimate relationships that have soured.
"I don't know exact numbers, but I'd estimate that probably 75 to 80 percent of the stalking cases are in a domestic context, relationships that have broken up and one side won't accept it," Tyiska said.
"Only 10 to 20 percent of the cases involve strangers, and those are usually people with severe mental illness. Occasionally you see a woman stalking a man, or the old girlfriend stalking the new girlfriend. But the vast majority of cases are men stalking women."
Advocates for women's rights say the criminalization of stalking is part of the evolution of law to reflect women's concerns.
"Over the last 25 years, with the advent of the women's movement, we have begun the process of reshaping the law in ways that are more responsive to women's experience, of giving things names, and defining them as part of a cultural pattern, rather than dismissing them as individual problems," said Elizabeth Schneider, who teaches at Brooklyn Law School. "That's what happened with sexual harassment, with battering and now with stalking."
Some experts warn that even with aggressive enforcement, stalking laws cannot offer complete protection.
"Women are still scared, and with good reason," said Alana Bowman, the deputy city attorney who supervises the Los Angeles Domestic Violence Unit. "They know these men are going to get out of jail, and we do know there are cases where the stalking starts again."
Experts say that many stalking cases have lurid twists: the man hiding in the attic with a gun, the murder of a pet, the defacing of old pictures, lawns, clothes or cars.
"Stalking is usually a process that escalates," said David Beatty, director of public policy at the National Victim Center in Washington. "It may start with phone calls that become harassing, then threatening, and then you get to the situation where the guy shows up on the doorstep with a gun."