Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don't write articles like this.

Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don't write articles like this.

I will posit that most stalkers fit the profile of a sociopath. Most of their victims probably do not. Trying to figure out how to think enough like a sociopath to outwit them if you, yourself, are not innately wired that way can be distasteful. But, if you don't, your efforts to manage the situation wind up either ineffectual or backfiring or both.

In this article, it says she did things like told him to stop sending so many messages or she would block him. When he didn't do as she asked, she blocked him. The result: It just made things worse.

This seems to be the usual pattern. The victim often tries tactics that just deepen the problem.

It gets to a point where politeness has nothing to do with it. If everything you try just makes the problem worse, trying to just not antagonize the creep can seem like the least worst option possible.

But yes, I get that some people are socialized in counterproductive ways. Maybe there's a market for enforcement services to help such victims. Reputable providers would, of course, verify claims of potential clients. On the other hand, IANAL. And there might well be liability for defamation.

I frequently try to talk about what women and other oppressed groups can do differently. I am routinely accused of victim blaming because of it, so I am aware that this is a hard thing to talk about effectively. But some of the problems here are:

1) If you are male and she is female, she may do the exact same things you did and not the get the results you got.

2) It sounds like you were probably an adult when you ran into this issue. She was just 12 when she met Danny.

3) She had known him a lot of years before it became apparent that he was a problem.

There are no doubt other problems with it. If you want to talk about better approaches and what targets of stalkers can do differently, I am up for that. But I am not really interested in "agreeing" that because you solved it yourself, she just must not have tried hard enough or something.

The reality is that while some responses to such people or situations tend to be more effective than others, if someone decides to target you, you may be unable to dissuade them from continuing to do so. In many cases, stalkers do not stop until they are dead. To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real way to put a stop to their behavior. And if you do so, the odds are really high you will go to jail. Most people would rather just keep trying to avoid the lunatic than go to jail.

Furthermore, abusive husbands who finally beat their wife to death do less prison time on average than abused wives who finally defended themselves with lethal force. Part of the reason for this is that men tend to have both a size and strength advantage over women, and it is also not uncommon for them to have an advantage of skill from having taken martial arts or served in the military. So, women very often need to pick up an equalizer and preplan it to have any hope of successively winning the battle. Thus, abusive men are very often charged with manslaughter and their victims are very often charged with premeditated murder in cold blood.

Thus, if you are a woman and some man decides to victimize you, you may find yourself in a situation that is simply shitty as hell no matter how you choose to handle it.

That fact needs to be acknowledged up front before talking about "well, what can the victim do to try to de-escalate such things before they become so entrenched?" And you seem to be in a head space where you think the victim can just do a thing and magically make it go away. This is often not the case at all, even if they are really savvy about handling shitty social situations.

> It looks to me like you are saying "Well, I was able to handle it myself, so she is just a loser that she couldn't."

Sorry if it comes off that way. I did manage to handle it. But it took months of tedious work. Yet I didn't mind, because I was extremely angry about it. And I knew that I was learning stuff that would be useful later.

I'm not saying that she's a loser. I'm saying that she was socialized to be nice. To find aggression distasteful, as you said. I do strive to be peaceful, and I seek peaceful friends. But unfortunately, entirely nonviolent and peaceful people can end up as victims.

So what can victims do? Going to authorities doesn't seem to work very well. Filing a lawsuit, as Hatena did against Hill, is expensive. That's why I floated the idea of private enforcement. Rather like PIs that take direct action against attackers. Instead of doxxing attackers personally, as puellavulnerata and I did, victims could hire consultants to manage it.

To avoid liability, there could be "Assassination Politics" type services. Attackers typically have multiple victims, so there would be multiple contributors. Who would, of course, be kept anonymous. The front end could be an easy-to-use app. And the service would be compartmentalized, with staff who verify allegations being fully anonymous, and firewalled fully from anonymous staff who handle action against attackers.

> To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real way to put a stop to their behavior.

Well, the first draft of my first post in this thread did include a sentence about having a group of friends with baseball bats pay this jerk a visit ;) But arguably, measures well short of death will stop most stalkers. Shaming to family and friends often does it. Or trashing their career, as puellavulnerata did. My stalker was a well-respected academic, and he was utterly freaked when I confronted him at his university email address.

I posted a link elsewhere in this thread suggesting that women need to learn to give pushback sooner rather than later. That is in the category of trying to not let yourself become a victim to begin with.

If you do become the target of something like this, well, it gets a lot more complicated. Your idea about shaming to family and friends is not necessarily effective. In the past, I have been moderately harassed online by a man who alternated between verbally feeling me up and verbally assaulting me. Any time he verbally felt me up, his girlfriend would attack me in some other discussion on the same forum. I complained to the mods. They saw no reason to intercede on my behalf.

Horrible people often have friends who are either horrible themselves or basically a good pawn. It is not unusual for a romantic interest to treat the object of desire as if they are intentionally being temptresses. There are complex reasons behind that.

But, yes, contacting them at work or implying/threatening that you will make it public in a way that materially harms them can be useful. If it is ugly enough, making it clear that you understand you can't win, but you can make them lose harder can be a useful way to get some breathing room.

But all of that requires you to understand what they want from you in specific and from life in general. Victims are often emotionally warm people with a lot of empathy. Coming to terms with how cold hearted, callous, manipulative, uncaring horribly assholes stalkers really are is an uncomfortable process for such people. Some of them will fail to get it through their thick skull because they would literally rather believe the world is a nice place and people are really good at heart than to let their delusions of that sort be destroyed by coming to terms with the truth of their situation.

And that is probably a rather muddled, hand-wavy comment. My heart isn't really in this discussion today.

Best.

I can only vaguely imagine that. I mean, I'm friendly and empathic enough. But I also have a short temper, and tend toward keeping grudges.

And about stalkers. They aren't necessarily cold hearted, callous, manipulative, and uncaring. Sometimes they're just unconsciously selfish and childish. I know because I've been there. I lusted for a close friend, for years. But she just wasn't interested. And yet, we apparently remained friends through it all. Later, I learned that her thesis adviser was harassing her sexually. And I got that I'd been a jerk, to not see it, and to be another problem for her.

Also: it would suck to have to spend money on something like that. Some random asshole of a stranger impacting your budget and savings? Maybe not as violating as the stalking itself, but certainly an insult added to the injury.

That should be the other way around, no? The financial damage is injurious whereas the stalking (like an insult) has mere psychological impact.