The Invisible Accomplice

Every data collection exercise on stalking and harassment in England and Wales describes the same demographic. The offender is male. The victim is female. The crime is dyadic. This is largely accurate. It is not the whole picture.

A significant and under-documented category of stalking and harassment involves coordinated participation by multiple individuals. They may be fans organising against someone who crossed their community's expectations. They may be an ex-partner's friends and family recruited as proxies. They may be people who encountered a persuasive account online and decided to act on it. Many of them are women. In each case, they contribute to a course of conduct that causes serious alarm and distress, and in most cases they face no legal consequence at all.

In fandom contexts, mass reporting of a target's accounts to get them suspended. Coordinated negative reviews. Publishing personal information. Contacting employers. Sustained pile-ons across multiple platforms. Each individual act may be a single message. Collectively they constitute what the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 defines as a course of conduct causing alarm or distress.

In domestic contexts, the mechanism is different but the structure is the same. A primary offender, typically someone with a fixation on the victim, recruits third parties (often called flying monkeys in the psychological literature) to monitor and report, pass messages, make contact the offender cannot make directly, or simply apply additional pressure. The aggregate effect is to make the victim feel surrounded, monitored, and without refuge.

Participants in coordinated harassment almost never understand themselves to be harassing anyone. They are protecting their community. They are supporting a friend. They are delivering consequences to someone they believe deserves them. This self-justifying framing is not incidental. It is structurally identical to the individual-level DARVO dynamic: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. In coordinated harassment, that reversal operates at a collective level.

R v Wall, 2025

Samantha Wall, 55, was sentenced to 28 months at Manchester Crown Court in October 2025 after pleading guilty to stalking, harassment and malicious communications against two victims over four years. Her campaign began after a two-minute conversation with motivational speaker Brad Burton at a business event. They had no further contact. Months later she was posting false claims, including that he had poisoned her cat, slashed her tyres, and fitted her with a tracking device. She claimed he was under investigation for stalking her. When arrested in September 2022, she maintained she was the victim.

R v Sheikh

Mr Sheikh was convicted of aggravated stalking of a Crown Court judge spanning five years (2016 to 2021), through a malicious blog named 'Judges Behaving Badly' that posted false content and actively facilitated similar contributions from others. The blog format invited and amplified other people's contributions, making each contributor a functional participant in the course of conduct. It is the closest documented UK prosecution to the coordinated-facilitation model.

Research on online harassment consistently documents women as its primary victims and men as its primary offenders. This is accurate at the aggregate level. But it creates a specific blind spot. Female participants in coordinated harassment campaigns are largely absent from data, from policy design, and from prosecution. Their participation tends to be treated as exceptional, as misguided rather than culpable, or as invisible altogether.