The Puzzle of Stalking

the ethics of following people around, looking through their bins, etc.

Last month, Augustine Lopez was jailed for stalking. Lopez is a 47-year-old Floridian who flew out to the UK last year, without booking a hotel, for the “sole purpose” of seeing Dr. Rebecca Smethurst—an Oxford academic, a science YouTuber who goes by “Dr. Becky”, an astrophysicist, and, key thing here, a person Lopez had never met.

On arrival, Lopez sent his luggage to Smethurst’s place of work, camping outside it for a number of days, and trying to gain entry a number of times. When police arrested Lopez, they found him with a can of pepper spray.

Above a certain threshold, nearly everyone thinks stalking should be illegal. I agree—sometimes, it should. But to identify why stalking should be illegal, it helps to identify what makes stalking wrong, and sufficiently wrong to merit jail time.

For nearly all obviously wrong practices—infanticide, zoophilia, wishing one’s in-laws would die—it’s tricky to give a philosophically precise account of why the practice is wrong. Stalking is no exception. On first pass, it’s tricky to pin down why it was wrong for Lopez to stalk Smethurst in the way he did (leaving aside the detail about the pepper spray, which betrays violent intent), and sufficiently wrong that it was OK for the police to arrest him. As feminist philosopher Elizabeth Brake explains the puzzle, in reference to a fictitious, Riverdale-inspired example involving Archie—the stalker—and Veronica—his victim:

[T]he paradigm case [of stalking] involves acts which are normally morally permissible—frequenting public places, sending gifts or cards, seeking to initiate contact. If Archie does not wrong Veronica by sending an unsolicited greeting card or gift, how does he wrong her by sending multiple cards and gifts? If he does not normally wrong her by walking past her house or workplace, how does he wrong her by doing so repeatedly? Stalkers seem to wrong their victims by doing what people are free to do; if walking down the street or frequenting a public place is a protected liberty, how does exercising this liberty violate the rights of another?

The problem can’t just be that Veronica doesn’t consent to Archie stalking her, even though that’s surely part of it. After all, if I don’t consent to a postman walking by my house or place of work on a public footpath, my lack of consent is irrelevant, morally. If stalking is likewise within a stalker’s rights and doesn’t wrong the victim, the victim’s failure to consent matters nish.

Another piece of the puzzle is explaining what makes stalking so extremely wrong. As Brake notes:

if an otherwise innocuous relative keeps emailing me pictures of kittens after being repeatedly asked to stop, their behavior would be disrespectful but not seriously wrong.

A solution to the Puzzle of Stalking should not only say why stalking is wrong, but also why it’s so much worse than sending someone unsolicited kitten photos.

In the paper, Brake blitzes through a range of possible solutions to the Puzzle of Stalking, and shows convincingly why many of them miss the mark. Here, I’ll regurgitate some of what she says, intermingled with my own examples and complaints:

1. Stalking enacts patriarchy: Zooming in on the gender distribution of stalking (most stalkers are men, most victims are women), you might try to explain the wrongness of stalking in terms of patriarchy: stalking is wrong because it targets women as women, and reinforces gender-based power hierarchies. But even if this is part of the explanation, it can’t capture the core of why stalking is wrong: though most stalkers are men and most victims are women, sometimes women stalk men, men stalk men, and women stalk women. Also, if stalking were practiced in an egalitarian fashion by genderless aliens, we’d still consider it wrong.

2. Stalking causes fear, distress, and the creeps: That stalking causes—or reliably risks causing—strong feelings of fear, distress, and the creeps, is a big part of why stalking is typically wrong. But it’s not the core of stalking’s wrongness: if some action of yours causes someone fear, distress, or some other negative emotion, that doesn’t give you an obligation not to do it if the fear, distress, or other negative emotions are unreasonable (e.g., a Black man can permissibly walk through a White suburb, even if doing so will predictably make some White people fearful, distressed, or angry, even if he could have easily taken a different route.) You might think that the fear stalking induces is obviously rational because, as I’ll note next, stalking correlates with violence. But there are two things to note: first, not all types of stalking (e.g., women stalking men) correlate strongly with violence. Such cases might cause other negative emotions, e.g., a certain sense of violation, or disgust, but the question is then whether these emotions are reasonable to have, and in virtue of what. This takes us back to the question of what, at bottom, makes stalking wrong, and thus fitting to be disgusted by. Relatedly, there are many cases in which some action causes others, quite reasonably, to be fearful, but where that action isn’t wrong to perform: assume it’s rational to fear hooded men in tracksuits when walking through dark alleys with no cameras. Plausibly, it’s permissible to be a hooded man in a tracksuit who walks down dark alleys with no cameras, fully aware that this might cause some to be rationally fearful. To show why stalking isn’t analogous to a case like this, we need to cast our net wider for an explanation.

3. Stalking threatens violence: Stalking correlates with violence, particularly violence against women (recall that Lopez had pepper spray). Even when stalkers don’t threaten violence explicitly, the correlation between stalking and violence is so strong that it may threaten violence anyway, just as how bringing a loaded gun to school threatens violence even when the carrier doesn’t threaten to fire it. Given this, you might think that what’s essentially wrong with stalking is that it threatens violence against its victims. The trouble with this suggestion, though, is that while the correlation between stalking and violence is strong in general, it’s not strong among certain subcategories of stalkers and victims (women who stalk men, cyber-stalkers who target victims from other countries, etc.), so not enough cases are covered.

4. Stalking narrows the victim’s options non-consensually: Stalkers force their victims to come into contact with people—namely, themselves—who the victim would rather not see or hear from. But, as Brake notes, we have no choice but to encounter people we’d rather avoid all the time: annoying co-workers, unpleasant bus drivers, and the like. Why is it objectionable that stalking victims can’t avoid their stalkers in public? The suggestion leaves that question unanswered.

5. Stalking violates the victim’s autonomy, by reducing her ability to choose who she interacts with/receives interactions from: Without anything more to fill it in, this explanation is plainly insufficient: when gay men kiss in public, they don’t (problematically) reduce the autonomy of homophobes over what enters into their line of vision, since their autonomy doesn’t extend to preventing gay men from kissing. To make good on this explanation, we’d need to show why stalking disrespects the victims autonomy in the first place, in a way that gay men kissing in front of homophobes doesn’t.

6. Stalking violates the victim’s autonomy by cluttering the victim’s headspace with thoughts of the stalker: You can’t see me, so let me tell you—I’m an attractive guy. If you saw me, you’d probably fall in love with me, and obsess your pretty little heart out (see, I’m flirting with you now, and you like it.) Still, I don’t think I wrong anyone by going out in public. You might think this case is different from that of stalking, because, unlike the thoughts you’re probably already having about me, now that you’ve googled me and seen my eyes, the thoughts a stalker clutters his victim’s head with are typically fearful, creeped out, and otherwise negative. But consider another case: during the Trump Years, many Americans were beset with Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition that rendered its victims paralysed with rage at everything Trump said or tweeted. Now, Trump is a bad guy and much of what he says and tweets (well, Truths) is bad, but if some people, for some reason, spent hours a day thinking angrily about a virtuous president who said good things—say, like Jimmy Carter—I don’t think Carter would wrong those people by saying those good things publicly, even if he knew doing so would clutter the heads of many people with negative thoughts about him, reducing their headspace and stopping them from focusing on the things they wanted to focus on.

7. Stalking violates the victim’s right to privacy: You might think people have a right to informational privacy—about what they do in their bedrooms, put in their bins, write in their letters, and so on—which stalking often violates. But this doesn’t capture the core wrong of stalking, since it’s possible to (impermissibly) stalk someone without violating their right to informational privacy: consider a man who follows a woman everywhere she goes, begging to marry her, but only when she’s out in public, busy doing things she’d ordinarily be fine with other people seeing her doing. Stalking frequently involves privacy violation, but that’s not the root of its wrongness.

What is the root of its wrongness? According to Brake, stalking is essentially wrong because it forces an unwanted relationship onto the victim. On Brake’s understanding,

Relationships consist in temporally extended patterns of certain behavior and attitudes. Behaviorally, they consist in contact and contact-seeking between particular persons, repeated and evolving over time.

Importantly, the objects of relationships are nonfungible. That is, when you seek a relationship with someone, you seek a relationship with them, specifically. Not just anyone will do. Applied to stalking, as Brake notes: “this distinguishes [the stalker] from a private detective, assassin-for-hire, or salesperson who might engage in similar behavior, but for whom the target is fungible.”

Stalking is a type of forced relationship. When X stalks Y, X acts as he might if he were in some sort of relationship with Y—sending her letters, sending her flowers, “accompanying” her on daily walks, watching her sleep, watching her shower, sending her lots of messages. But crucially, the relationship is wholly one-sided: the stalker wants the relationship he’s imposing (even if the part of it he likes is that the victim doesn’t like it)—the victim, in contrast, does not.

But people have a right and an interest in choosing who they’re in relationships with. Hence, by forcing a relationship on the victim against her will, the stalker violates both that right and that interest, often with predictably harmful consequences.

This account covers the whole range of cases (at least of contact-stalking—cyberstalking will be noted at the end): celebrity stalking, romantic stalking, stalking by sex pests—even stalking by those motivated by hatred of the victim. After all, many relationships—such as love-hate relationships, frenemy situations, abusive partnerships, rivalries, and hate fucks—can be motivated by hatred or dislike of the victim. Stalking motivated by hatred, resentment, or revenge are just forced relationships that fall within that category.

It’s also not overly inclusive: the relative who sometimes emails you unwanted cat photos is not doing something as bad as stalking; stalking, to count as such, must be sufficiently repetitive and prolonged (and, I’d add, serious: someone who comments ‘slay’ under all your blog posts, as often happens to me, is not doing anything as serious as stalking—the relational overtures must be of a sufficiently serious, outgoing, or effort-involving nature.)

Finally, it captures the seriousness of the wrong of stalking: our rights and interests in deciding who we have relationships with are very important; hence, the violation of those rights and interests is very serious—so serious, in fact, that many cases of stalking deserve criminal prosecution.

One plausible objection to all this, as Brake puts it, is that, instead of the core harm of stalking being located in the wrong of forced relationships, it is instead “the combination of threats of violence, psychological damage, and forcing a relationship which produces the distinctive harm of stalking.” But, as Brake notes, threats of violence and psychological harm only accompany the most serious cases of stalking; not all cases. The harm of forced relationships is the core of the wrong.

Now, there is one kind of stalking which—as Brake freely admits—her account doesn’t cover: surveillance stalking, which includes some cases of cyber-stalking—the kind of stalking that just involved gathering information on the victim, often through the internet, without any form of contact with the victim, seeking the victim’s presence, etc. The wrong of surveillance stalking needs its own discussion, since it’s substantively different in kind from the more regular kind of stalking, contact stalking, of the kind suffered by Dr. Smethurst. The account is meant to diagnose the wrong of contact stalking alone—and, by my lights, it does a pretty plausible job of it.