ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I briefly review the findings in this exploration of women's feelings about and experience of intimate stalking and the criminal justice system. I begin by explaining how stalking, victimization, and prosecution are each in their own way "courting disaster," and I discuss the identity dilemmas women face as a result. I explore what this explication of the experience of intimate stalking victims adds to our understanding of victimization processes and, especially, the revictimization that is so frequently reported by women who become involved with the criminal justice system, whether they are victims of stalking, sexual assault, or domestic violence. It is also important to consider the larger sociological agenda of which these issues are a part, that is, what this study reveals about the interrelatedness of the everyday "work" through which actors constitute emotions, identity, and social problems. Finally, I will propose some ways in which the criminal justice system might begin to address the complexity of victimization that occurs in complicated human relationships that do not always fit neatly into legal assignations of responsibility and agency
Courting Disaster and Disasters in Court
Sometimes stalking is courtship gone awry; when overtures are unwanted or when they alternate with com m uni cation s that are clearly coercive, definitions of interaction as "normal" heterosexual romance are called into question. These "definitional disruptions" (Goffman 1959:13) can become a courting disaster ranging from mild dis-ease (the annoyance imagined and experienced by some of the sorority women I surveyed) to a redefinition of the situation as dangerous and criminal m nature (the perspective of the women claiming victimization in the Domestic Violence Unit). The
and the narthat real-life stalkers often seem
ce those in the hypothetical scenarThe scenarios, in turn, clearly res-
of even those women who did not assert but who were merely the objects of ro-
data (cards, ratives of victims) in the .
