The five types of stalker and how to spot them

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You know how Hollywood loves a stalking story?

Like from Fatal Attraction, to I Know What You Did Last Summer, to the TV series You.

There is a decades-long fascination with this kind of behaviour.

And the Netflix smash hit series Baby Reindeer is just the latest pop culture entry

to bring stalking right back into the zeitgeist.

So you're a comedian?

Sort of.

It's not going well.

So is that a question?

Somebody hurt you, didn't they?

Who was it?

Martha, can you let go of my hand now, please?

Martha, please let go!

Stop, you dare!

If you haven't seen the show, it's definitely intense.

And it's about one person's experience of being stalked over several years.

And it's inspired by the real-life experience of creator and star Richard Gadd.

Although, I should mention, certain elements of the story are now in dispute.

But one of the things the series does really effectively is show the insidious day-to-day effects of stalking on a victim.

Like the minutiae of the experience, and how maddening it can be.

You just never know.

Is it going to continue?

Are they going to stop?

Why are they so obsessed with me?

So in this episode, we're exploring the psychology of stalkers.

What drives someone to stalk?

What it's like to watch Baby Reindeer if you've been stalked?

You're stalked.

She started to leave long voicemails.

And then that progressed to turning up in unexpected locations.

And then kind of consistently, every day, staying in a particular area where I might be.

And what to do, as well as definitely not do, if you suspect you have a stalker.

The initial impulse, I think, for all of us is like, I can probably sort this out.

This is All In The Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

Today.

The five types of stalker.

And how to stop them.

You don't need to have a finger laid upon you to have your life ruined by a stalker.

The question of why stalkers stalk only really started to be asked by researchers in the 80s and 90s.

So really not that long ago.

And back then.

When most of the work that was happening was happening out of Los Angeles.

You can probably guess why.

There are a lot of people who would pursue and stalk celebrities.

So the LAPD and researchers there had started to look at why are people doing this behaviour?

Are there particular types?

This is the town and the decade where, in 1989, a 21-year-old actress named Rebecca Schaefer was murdered by a fan who'd been stalking her for years.

Robert John Bardo is 19, and police believe he was obsessed with the actress he's charged with kill 있어서.

And before Rebecca, Jodie Foster had also been stalked.

Her stalker went so far as to try and assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in a bid to impress her.

The man suspected of shooting President Reagan was, according to media reports, obsessed

with the film Taxi Driver and its young star.

He's said to plan the assassination attempt to impress Miss Jodie Foster.

And in 1988.

Rossi had long left the Jack Daniels, her favourite destinations trip.

woman who'd been stalking talk show host David Letterman was also imprisoned. So it makes a lot

of sense why research into stalking kicked off in LA. But people elsewhere were becoming curious

about stalking behavior more generally, like beyond the celebrity sphere. And soon, in a less

obvious turn, an Australian city became the global leader in stalking research. And so I can

understand why LA was such a center of research. How did Melbourne come to be such a center of

research for stalking? It was really just that we had these world-leading forensic psychiatrists

who had an interest in this behavior. They were seeing both perpetrators as well as victims of

stalking. And thankfully, we're clinicians that were really driven by research as well to understand

why does this occur and what can we do to try and make

this less damaging to victims? And the flip side, how can we make sure that people don't

continue to stalk? And this is where Rosemary Purcell enters the picture. That's his voice

you've been hearing from. Yeah, so my name's Rosie Purcell. I'm a professor of mental health

at the University of Melbourne. And back in the late 90s and early 2000s, Rosie was doing her

PhD on stalking. And those world-leading psychiatrists, Paul Mullen and Michelle Pathé,

were gamers' supervisors. And together, they produced game-changing work, developing the first

evidence-based typology, or classification, for stalkers. And so we had the opportunity to look at

well over 100 cases, people that had either been referred to courts and convicted of stalking,

and as part of their sentence, they had to engage in treatment, all seen at our clinic in Melbourne.

And so based on this group, here are the five types they identified. I should say this

typology is still used today to assess risk. And the first type is the most common. They're

the rejected stalker. That was a person that was harassing a victim in the context of a

relationship breakdown. Usually these people are former romantic partners, but they can be

former friends or even family members who've become estranged.

The second group they identified are called intimacy seekers.

Who were mostly mentally unwell individuals, who were pursuing someone that they delusionally

thought was interested in them. This is the group that many celebrity stalkers fall into.

A lot of people that stalk celebrities either have a delusion that the celebrity is in love

with them and already somehow kind of magically communicating with them,

or they just have that hope beyond hope, that morbid infatuation that if they stalk them,

something will come out of it.

After rejected stalkers and intimacy seekers, the third group they identified are called

incompetent suitors.

Where really they lacked the social skills to develop a relationship with a person,

so they ended up harassing and stalking them instead.

These stalkers are attracted to their victims, but unlike intimacy seekers,

they're not infatuated. And they don't have delusions about how their victim feels about them.

They just think and hope that their behavior will eventually lead to a relationship.

The fourth group is a bit different, in that they're not stalking in the context of a romantic

or close relationship. They're called resentful stalkers.

As the name implies, it had a grievance basis behind the stalking,

and often we'd see that in workplace contexts.

These people feel that they're not stalkers.

These people feel they've been mistreated somehow, that an injustice has been done to them,

so they're out for revenge.

Finally, the fifth group are also the least common. They're the predatory stalkers.

And they were individuals almost exclusively targeting strangers or acquaintances

in preparation for the most part, so that they could assault them.

And unfortunately, sexually assault them was what they usually were aiming for.

So, yeah, they're the five types, but I will just say they're probably not limited to that,

that there can be different types of stalkers. There can be overlapping types.

So we don't want to say this is just the only five and everyone fits into this.

But the notion is if we can understand what motivates the stalking,

and more importantly, keeps it going, because this isn't a one-off, it's a chronic behavior,

then that might give us a better idea of what's going on.

And that might give us a handle on what's going to work best here for managing them.

While the rejected stalker remains the most common type,

Rosie says over time, another group started popping up more frequently,

and that's the incompetent suitor. Remember, they're the ones who resort to harassment and

stalking because they don't really understand social cues or how to court someone properly.

Rosie thinks the internet and social media might have something to do with that.

When we started off looking at this group,

we used to talk about how, say in the olden days, we did have social structures where people who

maybe were a bit more inept in just talking to people, getting relationships going,

we had the structures to facilitate that. So people who might introduce us to one another

at parties, at dinners, and just try to assist. And I guess as we start to see more fracturing

in our social structures, we don't have that sense of

community. We don't have that sense of community.

We don't have that sense of community. We don't have that sense of community.

We don't have that sense of community necessarily anymore. And the irony to me that we have this

thing called social media, which is predominantly antisocial in many ways, that's pretty fertile

ground just to giving rise to people who genuinely struggle. And if they're spending more time on an

online environment, they don't have those opportunities to read social cues,

read when people may not be interested in them. And so that's where,

maybe we're just starting to see a bit more of that.

Is there one type of stalker that's most dangerous?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And I guess it comes down to

what we define as dangerous. So if we're talking about the physical risks that they pose to their

victims, we definitely know that rejected ex-partners are very risky in that regard.

They have a very high propensity for threatening their victims and for potentially,

really assaulting them as well. But one of the things that we learned really listening to the

voices of the victims themselves is you don't need to have a finger laid upon you to have your life

ruined by a stalker. It's the mental load, the impact on one's mental health that can be

incredibly damaging. And people may just be so overwhelmed by this that they're not able to

work. They're not able to keep

up their social relationships because they're so distressed and damaged by this behaviour.

The only reason I did anything is that friends and my partner pointed out that something could

happen to us as well. And then that's the thing that clicked me into like, I can't just put up

with this. This is someone we're calling Lindsay. She's a child and adolescent psychiatrist,

and she knows professionally as well as

professionally that she's a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

The impact of stalking on a victim.

Back when she was in training, so a junior doctor, she was stalked by a patient.

It's quite common actually for health professionals to be stalked. And part of that is because

we're servicing a population of people that might have a high risk of mental disorders,

but also very socially isolated in many situations. And when we're providing care or empathy or

medical service, which is very intimate, it's around...

Bodies and minds and difficult life experiences. There is a tendency sometimes for that to be

misconstrued. And for me, it was in the context of working as a very junior psychiatry register.

It was my, you know, in my early stages. And this was a patient who had been a long-term

patient of the service and who was, I guess, in some ways, my perception at the time was being

pretty...

Unfairly treated or neglected.

Lindsay felt sorry for this patient, which speaks to how much she cares as a doctor. But

here's something I didn't know until doing this show. Pity is the exact emotion that can get you

into a lot of trouble with potential stalkers. We'll unpack why that is in a moment. But for now,

Lindsay was part of a team that was advocating for this patient.

Because of the long nature of her treatment and time in that service, I did get to know her quite

well.

And what was, I guess, for me, very benign interaction where I would, you know, talk to her

about her medication and her symptoms, like talking to her, asking her, how are you going?

Yeah, just being nice.

Just being nice. That was like the one kind of contact she was having in a very restricted life

in this unit. And so it was very understandable to me that in that context, someone would form,

I guess, that that would have meaning to them.

But it was only once the patient, let's call her Susie, once Susie left, that her behavior turned

worrying. The first thing Susie did was get a hold of Lindsay's phone number. Lindsay has no idea how.

She started to leave long voicemails. And then that progressed to turning up in unexpected

locations. And then kind of consistently, every day, staying in a particular area where I might

be frequenting.

And I guess, you know, it's interesting to think about. But for me, I felt a mixture of

not wanting to criminalize something that was maybe due to her own vulnerabilities,

not wanting to, I guess, bring criminal sanctions on someone that I thought could be better dealt

with, with psychiatric treatment.

But after a couple of weeks, Lindsay decided to report Susie's behavior to her bosses

at the health service. She didn't get much help, though.

They were just sort of like dismissing it.

And so, yeah, I started to not do anything about it. Because I think also, I mean, within health

professionals in general, there's a sense of denial and minimization of aggression or bad

things that happen. I mean, you sort of need that to get through like three months of nights.

Yeah, I guess so.

In that there's a tendency just to kind of persevere.

So that's what Lindsay did. She persevered for six months all up.

And during that time, she says she was grappling with this

weird sense of guilt and responsibility.

I wanted to resolve it nicely. Yeah, I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. I didn't want to

cause that person to feel more shame or like than they already felt. But it was also a bit of like,

oh, I've somehow created this. I can end it.

And it was only once her friends and her partner said, hey, you don't know where this behavior

could end and we could be at risk, that Lindsay decided to get serious about stopping it.

And so how did it stop? How long did it go on for total?

Well, it stopped very easily in that there was nothing ever. There was never any threatening

aggressive behavior. But basically, I sent a very clear email stating that unless measures

were taken to manage this by the health service, that I was going to go to the police.

Right.

And then I don't know what happened on their end, but obviously they managed it. Yeah.

Given Lindsay's experience, suffice to say, watching Baby Reindeer was not triggering exactly,

but a full on experience.

It was interesting for me because I really recognized the ignoring and the denial and

the minimization. But the really interesting parallel is that both Lindsay and Donnie,

the main character in Baby Reindeer, begin their relationship with their stalker,

with feelings of pity. If you haven't seen the show, don't worry, this isn't a spoiler,

but the whole thing kicks off when Martha, the stalker character, comes into Donnie's pub and

he can tell she's a bit lonely or a bit odd, maybe down on her luck. In any case,

she doesn't seem to have money for a drink, so he shouts her a cup of tea.

Things progress down a very dark road from there, and thankfully things don't get quite

so dark for Lindsay, but the similarity is there.

I felt really...

Really, I guess, empathy for her situation in that this was a woman who was previously

really high functioning.

So why is pity dangerous?

We often think of stalkers as being aggressive, narcissistic, angry people, but actually the

really damaging behaviors to watch out for are where we pity someone, because actually

stalkers are very adept at eliciting that kind of response.

And for me, that was the kind of concerning thing, watching it, thinking, oh, he feels sorry

for her, he pities her, he's going to get drawn into a very complex dynamic here.

That is so interesting. Before watching the show, I wouldn't have thought about how dangerous

sympathy can potentially be with the wrong person. That is really worrying because people,

you know, generally want to be empathetic, you want to be, you know, sensitive to people's

struggles.

How do we assess when to not feel sorry and express that too much to a person?

It's awful because the extension of that is that we just don't have sympathy. And that's

not the sort of society that we want to be in, but it is an absolute red flag. Anyone

that is making us feel sorry for them, sad, pity, we have to think, why? Why am I feeling

that way? And is this actually a healthy way of interacting?

So I think absolutely the default is sympathy. But where you feel, oh, I'm uneasy and queasy

here, that's the sign to trust yourself.

And what, like, makes a person inclined to fixate and stalk? Like, is there generally

sort of some sort of mental illness or personality disorder at play that contributes to these

behaviors?

It really varies according to the type of stalker. So that group that we call the intimacy seeker,

they really are characterized by high rates of mental illness, conditions like erotomania. So

erotomania is a mental disorder. It's often seen in the context of conditions like schizophrenia

or psychosis. And it's the belief that a person is in love with you. Other types of stalking,

as you said, there can be personality disorder, but there's no unifying kind of theory as to,

you know, why people stalk. So some people might have had experiences in their own life

where they have real attachment challenges. And that's one big area of research. How does

attachment theory contribute to this behavior? But in other areas, that's completely irrelevant.

I want to come back to the issue of pity and how feeling sorry for someone can lead to trouble

in certain circumstances.

Because it's so tricky, right? Like not just for the reasons we mentioned, like wanting to be nice

to a person, but also because past trauma can influence how you behave in the present. We see

this in Baby Reindeer, where Donnie is grappling with some really awful things that have happened

to him. And that influences part of how he behaves with a stalker, Martha. For Lindsay,

there was also something in her past that was influencing her behavior with her patient.

I think that's a good question.

I think this is what's so fascinating and what I liked about the series is that how much it ties

into his own trauma. And for me, when I was doing all this self-evaluation around it,

I was trying to really thinking to myself, what is it about me that felt like I couldn't

prioritize what I needed and just had to keep kind of providing care? And I think part of that was

that I had left a previous specialty before I went into psychiatry because that year before,

I had been part of a care team where a young person had died. And whilst I hadn't been the

person, you know, responsible in that sense, I had been part of the team that should have cared

for that individual. That death affected Lindsay so deeply that she ended up changing specialties

and switching to psychiatry. I had really thought about or really brought up for me this idea of

letting, what does it mean to let someone down? What does it mean to compulsively reenact something

in the sense of, for me,

that intense desire that I started to overwork or be more present at work or to see more patients

or to do more. If someone asked something of me, I had to do it. Otherwise, if you don't do it,

something terrible could happen. And so that's what I think drew me into Baby Reindeer is this

idea of how trauma affects us, but how we, the reenactments and the acting out and the ways in

which we, in unprocessed trauma, kind of avoid thinking and feeling something, but it comes out

throughout.

Obviously, that's not to say that a person is ever to blame for being stalked. It's just

interesting and worthwhile unpacking why we sometimes behave the way we do. And so how do

you stop a stalker? For Lindsay, pushing her health service to act worked for her. But what about in

other situations? Well, the answer varies slightly depending on the type of stalker you're dealing

with. But the first thing to know is that you're not the only one. You're not the only one. You're

not the only one. You're not the only one. You're not the only one. You're not the only one. You're

not the only one. You're not the only one. You're not the only one. You're not the only one.

And so the idea, what I mean by that, jokingly, is that you definitely shouldn't engage in, you know, there's a part where he's talking to his dad and he's like, I need to win.

You know, we can't let Martha win.

Yeah.

Definitely not feeling the need to be drawn into a dynamic where someone, where you need to one up or get, you know, punish or get control of the stalker yourself.

Right.

Or, you know, not trying to solve the issue yourself.

So the idea is that you don't communicate with them.

Right.

Say nothing.

Yeah.

That you don't respond, but that you report it.

Any attention, even negative attention, screaming, swearing, abusing the stalker back, is fuel for them.

The important thing is hold on to all forms of evidence of the stalking.

So it can be text messages, voicemail, if they've been sending you so-called gifts.

Hold on to all of that because it can be useful for a future prosecution.

But absolutely don't respond.

Because, unfortunately, it just reinforces them and keeps it going.

How do stalkers typically stop?

What makes them stop?

Usually what makes them stop is some form of either legal or medical intervention.

And this is a really important point because many victims just hope that this person will get the message, that they'll understand that they're not interested in them and give up.

Right.

And we're not talking about people who either care or read social cues.

So our research showed if the stalking's been going on for at least two weeks, it's not going to just stop of its own accord.

Wow.

It's going to continue.

Yep.

That's such a small window.

Yep.

So we see a couple of forms of behavior.

One is a really intensive burst of kind of harassment that might last for a couple of days.

And that tends to be more of that grievance, anger, just venting.

But if the behavior continues for over two weeks, the likelihood is it will continue for months and sadly in some cases years.

So how does it stop?

You need to convey to the person, I don't want this.

I don't want you contacting me.

And if they continue, then yep, going to the police or seeking other advice, depending on what type of person you're talking to.

I don't know what type of stalker we think it might be, but that hope against hope, unfortunately, almost never works.

In terms of prevalence, Rosie says about a quarter to a third of the population might have a brief experience of stalking at some point in time.

But in terms of the more prolonged, months-long, more intrusive stalking, that's about 10% of the population that will experience that.

Certain groups are at much higher risk, though.

Like women leaving violent or controlling relationships and health care workers.

How common is it for men to be the victims of stalking versus women?

That's a very interesting question.

So stalking is a crime.

And part of the crime is that it must cause fear to the victim.

So if we look at it from that perspective, men typically would be the minority of victims of stalking.

But if we take out that requirement of fear, and we might say that it's an irritation, it's a nuisance, it's an annoyance,

actually, we start to see the figures be more like 50-50.

So men, rightly or wrongly, will tend to say, you know, this behavior bothered me, I didn't like it, but it didn't cause me fear.

And that's really the crucial part for any prosecution of stalking as a crime.

Do you have any other advice for what people should do?

If they're being stalked, and whether what they should do differs depending on the type of stalker they have?

Yeah, it does differ on the type of stalker.

So a lot of people might take out an intervention order.

Sometimes that can help, particularly for that more incompetent type.

But for an intimacy-seeking stalker, legal sanctions usually have zero impact.

We literally saw some stalkers who were sent to jail for their behavior,

and caught a taxi from the jail to the stalker's home.

Because if you are mentally ill and delusional, you need treatment.

You need medication, counseling, support.

And if you're not getting that in prison, that's not going to help at all.

As for the depiction of stalking in Baby Reindeer,

Rosie, the professor of mental health at the University of Melbourne,

reckons Martha, who's the stalker character in the show,

probably is an incompetent suitor type of stalker.

So someone who's missing social cues, rather than someone who's totally delusional.

Although Lindsay reckons Martha is an intimacy-seeker type, with erotomania.

So very delusional.

It's all debatable, but either way,

they both hope the show can push the conversation around the effects of stalking forward.

Despite the controversy that the show has also garnered,

over whether Netflix went far enough to conceal the identity

of the real person that the Martha character is based on.

Yeah, I think it did a really good job of demonstrating, I guess,

the range of different ways that stalkers can behave, and how things can escalate,

but also the ways in which the people around the victim can respond.

I think it was thought-provoking, and I'm glad that we're having a conversation again about stalking.

It's been an eye-opener in my experience for younger people,

who are talking about this, thinking about it, but I was very glad when it ended.

I was asking my sister, who I was watching it with,

can we just skip a few episodes?

I've got the gist of what's happening here, can we just cut to the end?

But no, she forced me all the bitter way through.

That is Professor Rosie Purcell from the University of Melbourne.

You also heard from someone

we've called Lindsay to protect her identity.

She's a psychiatrist who is stalked by a patient.

Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen,

as well as sound engineer Simon Brantwaite.

I'm Sana Khadar.

Thank you for listening.

I'll catch you next time.

Bye.

This is weird.

But how the duck did it evolve?

I mean, do we know why we do it?

I'm Anne Jones, and I'm here to give you the down and the dirty on the birds and the bees.

It could get a bit spicy, so I'm not sure if this is censored.

This is going to be fun.

Yeah, sex is weird.

And you can get some by searching What The Duck with me, Anne Jones, on the ABC Listen app.

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