Clare Waxman‘s life was ruined by a stalker – she was plagued by anxiety and fears for her family’s safety for seven years . So why is sixteen weeks of jail time considered a just punishment?
A new article in the Guardian poses exactly this question, examining three different stalking cases in the context of the life-shattering after-effects, and the fairly light punishments received. The piece revolves around the recent judgment in the case of Waxman – after coping with seven years of harassment, silent phone calls, and physical threats (such as her stalker showing up at her child’s day care and breaking into her car), the perpetrator was sentenced to sixteen weeks in jail, for violating the restraining order. Anti-stalking advocates are outraged by the decision, but it reflects cultural and societal attitudes about the nature of the crime.
Neil Addison, a barrister who specialises in harassment law, agrees that this can be a problem for the justice system. “Individual incidents may be trivial, but it’s the totality of the incidents that make it harassment . . . Most stalkers are intelligent enough not to make threats; it’s their presence that causes the fear, because you don’t know what they will do. They often concentrate on their victim never feeling free of them, rather than a direct threat.”
Many times, the threat is directly tied with the promise of violence. While many stalkers would paint themselves as persistent admirers, far too often their behavior is about control. Eventually, if the target (women are the most frequent victims of stalking, but men are also impacted) fails to behave in the way the stalker wants, the situation could become lethal. As the Guardian explains:
Such violence can go hand in hand with stalking, and can end in murder. “I did a study of 5,000 victims,” says Sheridan, “and one in five had been sexually assaulted by a stalker. The violence rate is 20-30%.” This is more common when the stalker and victim have had a previous relationship, such as in the case of Clare Bernal, who was just 22 when she was shot dead in the Harvey Nichols store where she worked. Her ex-boyfriend, Michael Pech, a security guard at the same store, had been due in court a week later for stalking her and had been released on bail when he murdered her and turned the gun on himself. Her mother, Patricia, says Pech had already threatened to kill Clare, but the Crown Prosecution Service had advised her to drop the charges. “One night, as he was following her, she turned around and told him she would report him. He said, ‘If you report me I will kill you’. Then he smiled and stroked her face. We didn’t know what to do. She was so scared.”
Going to law enforcement is tricky. The Guardian documents the deficiencies in taking a harassment claim to the authorities in the UK, but as the United States Office of Justice points out, policy, laws, and legislation around stalking in any country leave much to be desired:
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