ABSTRACT
Stalking is now widely considered to be a particular form of ‘harassment’. In the past it has been linked to various mental conditions, notably De Clerambault’s syndrome and erotomania. De Clerambault, a French psychiatrist, first identified a condition in 1927 that he labelled psychose passionelle. De Clerambault stated that sufferers were primarily females who laboured under the delusional belief that a man, with whom she may have had little or no contact, returned intense feelings of love for her. The target of affections were usually persons of much higher socio-economic status and likely to be unobtainable to the sufferer, such as a film star or a politician. Erotomania, a DSM-IV delusional disorder, has the same predominant theme, and research has suggested that diagnoses are primarily given to females (see Bruene 2001; Fitzgerald and Seeman 2002; Kennedy, McDonough, Kelly and Berrios 2002; Lloyd-Goldstein 1998). When stalking research burgeoned in the 1990s, it soon became apparent that the modal stalker was male, rather than female, and that women were more likely to be victims of stalking than men. Spitzberg (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of the stalking literature, reporting that across more than 40 samples, 79 per cent of stalkers were male and that 75 per cent of victims were female. It also became clear that stalkers are a heterogeneous, rather than a homogenous, group (e.g. Budd and Mattinson 2000; Meloy 1999; Mullen, Pathé and Purcell 2000). Children and adolescents, for instance,
have been found to engage in stalking behaviour (McCann 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002).
