ABSTRACT
The research on stalking and unwanted pursuit is still in its infancy. Psychiatrists described cases of delusional lovesickness as early as the 1920s. In the span of less than a decade, over 100 studies have been conducted in which statistics on stalking or obsessive relational intrusion have been reported by victims or about perpetrators. Despite some consistency of measurement within and across research teams, there is still considerable inconsistency across the entire domain of stalking and unwanted pursuit research. The chapter offers a series of topographic maps of stalking motives and tactics. These typologies are extracted directly from examination of the existing studies with quantifiable estimates of motives and behaviors. The topography of threat that emerged from the data illustrates a pastiche of potential harms. The first category of coercion is general or vague threats. This category represented items in the data that literally referred to "vague" or "general" threats without specifying what form those threats might take.
