ABSTRACT
The scientific research on stalking and unwanted pursuit is still relatively undeveloped. Psychiatrists described cases of delusional love sickness as early as the 1920s (de Clérambault, 1942; Goldstein, 1987; Leong, 1993). Starting in the 1940s, and continuing in the 1960s and 1980s, a few studies reported on cases of psychotic individuals visiting the White House, often with great persistence and in the face of frequent prior rejection (Hoffman, 1943; Sebastiani & Foy, 1965; Shore et al., 1985; Shore et al., 1989). Research in the early 1990s examined threats made on public officials (Dietz et al., 1991a), professionals (e.g., Bernstein, 1981; Miller, 1985; Tryon, 1986), and celebrities (Dietz et al., 1991a). By the late 1970s, research on sexual harassment began exploring patterns of behavior that would later be interpretable as stalking or obsessive relational intrusion (e.g., DiVasto et al., 1984; Herold, Mantle, & Zemitis, 1979; Jason et al., 1984; Land, 2003; Popovich, Licata, Nokovich, Martelli, & Zoloty, 1986; Savitz, 1986; Sheffield, 1989; Stanko, 1985; Warner, 1988). Contemporary research has extended such topics into bullying (Dooley et al., 2009; Erdur-Bakerr, 2010; Gradinger et al., 2009; Kraft & Wang, 2010; McCann, 2006; Nielsen & Einarsen, 2012; Randall, 2001; Schrock, & Boyd, 2011; Snell & Englander, 2010; Walker, Sockman, & Koehn, 2011) and social aggression (Archer & Coyne, 2005; Heilbron & Prinstein, 2008; Hershcovis, 2011; Dailey et al., 2007). However, research explicitly investigating the phenomenon of stalking did not begin until the mid-1990s, after legislative bodies began explicitly criminalizing the behavior.
