When John,* 40, found out that his partner had cheated on him, the mental obsession about why she’d done it began to consume him. They continued to live with each other, but after 13 months he left their shared property on England’s south coast to live elsewhere, and his mindset got worse. “It messed with my head a lot,” says John. “When it sunk in, I started to drink heavily.” Then when his ex-partner finally cut all contact, it exploded. “I wanted the answers,” he tells me.
He bombarded her for four months last summer with “20 unwanted emails a day”, he tells me, calling her endlessly, leaving voice messages, and checking her social media, as well sending texts to her friend to find out what she was up to. “My behaviour became disgusting really,” he reflects.
His former partner finally went to the police. It was a shock, he says, when he was arrested for stalking. In his eyes, it was his ex who was in the wrong for cheating on him.
“If I hadn’t been arrested, my behaviour would have escalated to another level to becoming a ‘proper stalker’ – it would have got the better of me,” he admits in hindsight, mentioning the more traditional view of stalking behaviours that might have come into play, such as turning up at her house, as the next step.
He is lucky that it was caught in time. He voluntarily opted to attend 12 therapy sessions at a stalker clinic in Hampshire, funded by the county’s Police and Crime Commissioner, rather than get a stalking conviction after he was arrested in October 2024.
Since he has been in therapy for his stalking behaviour, he has discovered it was due to his traumatic childhood. “I couldn’t close the chapter on it [his childhood trauma],” he explains about the fact he was “never loved” as a child.
He had also bonded with his ex-partner over shared childhood trauma which made it even harder for him to deal with the betrayal, he says. It was the first time that he’d really opened up to somebody.
He recognises that the way he behaved stems from this trauma. “One minute, it’d be ‘I love you’, ‘I miss you’, and then I’d be on the attack. Often, it’d be very nasty and intimidating communication.”
Since he’s been in therapy, he’s learnt to love and care for himself – and has stopped drinking which fuelled the stalking behaviour. He is rebuilding his life in his local community – and not playing out his trauma on an ex-partner. “I was trying to force somebody to love me,” he tells me.
Helping stalkers recover through addressing the underlying psychological reasons for their behaviour is not an area of stalking often reported. Instead, we are inundated with celebrity stalkers in the news. The tennis star Emma Raducanu “couldn’t see the ball through tears” and could “barely breath” when she spotted her stalker during her match against Karolina Muchova at the Dubai Open in February. As the game was halted, she was visibly shaken as she stood behind the umpire’s chair, while the man was removed.
And last month, Jennifer Aniston’s stalker was arrested for reportedly ramming his car into the front gates of the Friends star’s Bel Air home while she was inside. He is accused of repeatedly sending Aniston unwanted social media, voicemail, and email messages for over two years. Lily Allen endured her stalker for seven years, Keira Knightley’s stalker miaowed through the letterbox at her Islington home, and Harry Styles’s stalker sent him 8,000 cards in less than a month and was jailed in 2024 for 14 months.
But the reality is more unsettling– anyone can end up the victim of a stalker, including men. But those men are in the minority. About 24 per cent of women experience stalking across a lifetime, compared to about 9 per cent of men, according to The Crime Survey of England and Wales.
Cases seen by the Hampshire Stalking Partnership also indicate that the victim is usually female (92 per cent) – while the stalker is most often an ex-partner (74 per cent) and male (91 per cent), according to Dr Kirsty Butcher, the principal clinical psychologist and clinical lead of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS team within the Multi-Agency Stalking Partnership. Her small team provide direct psychological intervention to people who have engaged in stalking behaviours; last year they helped to rehabilitate 61 stalkers. Many are also treated at the Stalking Threat Assessment Centre and National Stalking Clinic in north London.
It brings into question: How does it feel to be a stalker, and can they be rehabilitated? Should society have more compassion for them?
In Hampshire, one of the few places with dedicated stalking intervention, stalkers can be offered nine to 12 sessions of one-to-one therapy, either voluntarily, mandated through an out-of-court disposal, or through probation. It’s similar at the National Stalking Clinic, where the majority of interventions are between 10 and 20 therapy sessions.
There is a 40 to 50 per cent reoffending rate in the UK, and evidence from the Stalking Threat Assessment Centre indicates that psychological intervention can reduce reoffending to much lower than this – to 22 per cent. The number of prosecuted offences has doubled since 2020, partly due to stalking advocacy, which supports the victim through the prosecution process, and increased awareness about the way stalking is classified to include cyberstalking. As the government “Report a stalker” website points out, stalking isn’t always about being followed; it can involve “being sent unwanted emails”.
“We are looking at behaviour that is fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repeated,” says Dr Butcher about what constitutes a “stalker” – a word she avoids, instead preferring to use “people who engage in stalking”, believing it puts the spotlight on addressing the behaviour, rather than labelling the person.
She will look at various factors such as “Is it checking someone’s Facebook a couple of times, or is it actually to that level that it’s causing the victim distress, alarm and fear?” and, “Is this behaviour going on longer than two weeks?”
“The scientific evidence shows us if it is, it’s more likely going to continue,” she says.
There are five categories of stalker: the “rejected stalker” which occurs at the end of a relationship and is the most prevalent. Elsewhere, “resentful stalking” goes hand-in-hand with a grievance or a grudge. “Incompetent-suitor-style stalking” is when the person wants a relationship with the victim but they don’t know how to instigate it in an appropriate manner.
“Intimacy-seeking stalking” happens within a serious mental illness and is often delusional, where the person believes they are star-crossed lovers. “Predatory-style stalking” is when the individual stalks the victim in order to carry out a sexual assault, with the stalking behaviour being gratifying in itself. In addition, there is “celebrity stalking”, which may be a combination of different motivations, says Dr Butcher.
“Generally, a celebrity stalker is psychologically avoiding the emptiness of their own lives – or they have a severe mental illness and believe they are in relationship with them.”
Not all stalking is caused by mental health issues, although there are higher rates of it and personality disorders in people who engage in stalking. Attachment issues are common, especially in the case of people who fit the profile of the rejected stalker.
“We are looking at people who may have had experiences in their childhood that left them feeling really sensitive to rejection,” she says.
If we can show compassion and understanding, address the psychological issues that are driving this behaviour, alongside robust criminal sanctions, we have a chance of stopping it and the torment of their victims
But recovering stalkers are taught skills such as how to cope with feelings of anger at being rejected or abandoned, poor impulsivity and how to stop thoughts of the victim going around in their heads.
Sessions are either face-to-face at a health centre, hospital, or probation service – or else, online. The toll of being stalked is huge – over 90 per cent of victims suffer severe psychological impact, according to a 2023 study titled “The Impact of Stalking and Its Predictors: Characterising the Needs of Stalking Victims”, which suggests that victims (and potentially those close to them) require trauma-informed support from clinicians.
The stalking episode can last from two weeks to a person’s entire life. A victim may have to move home, their children’s schools and their workplace. But while some stalking is violent, Dr Butcher says it’s important not to minimise the psychological effects of stalking, which can impact every aspect of a person’s life.
The worst cases of intrusion, however, are often the ones that have persisted the longest and involve behaviours that show a high extent of time and effort, says Dr Alan Underwood, principal clinical psychologist at London’s Stalking Threat Assessment Centre and National Stalking Clinic.
These include turning up at an individual’s home, even when they’ve moved; searching for them abroad; and making malicious professional complaints against the victim to cause further harm. Stalkers can impersonate other people such as police officers and social care workers to intimidate or gain information from the victim; recruit private investigators to follow the person to stalk by proxy and intrude even further; and place listening devices in the victim’s home.
“The behaviours are only limited by the person’s time capability and their imagination really,” says Dr Underwood. “It is born out of a person’s difficulty in coping with what is going on in their lives – but how they are dealing with it often makes the situation worse.” What is often driving it is loneliness, rejection, abandonment, and a sense of grievance that the world is not as it should be, which causes a person distress, he adds.
“In the majority of cases we are looking at another sorry story about violence towards women and girls,” says Dr Butcher. But she acknowledges that society lacks understanding of the complexity – and the motivations – of stalkers.
“I think it is a misunderstood type of behaviour,” she says. “We can get angry and blame the bad person who has done this – but it’s not useful.”
Often the stalking behaviour becomes that person’s life, she says, so they have nothing else going on other than the stalking. The work of the intervention programmes is about helping stalkers engage with life again, and build up a social network, rather than them living in their obsession.
“If we can show compassion and understanding, address the psychological issues that are driving this behaviour, alongside robust criminal sanctions,” says Dr Butcher, “it means that we have a chance of stopping it and the torment of their victims.”
* John’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity
