The Wrong Kind of Stalker

Stalking is one of the most underreported, under-prosecuted and misunderstood crimes in England and Wales. The Crime Survey estimates over one million victims a year. Only 5% of reports to police in the year ending March 2022 resulted in a charge. Police dropped 30,000 investigations for evidential difficulties, even where the victim supported action.

When the joint IOPC, HMICFRS and College of Policing investigation reported in September 2024, it found clear evidence supporting every ground of the super complaint. Misidentification of stalking. Flawed investigations. Inaction. Failure to apply stalking protection orders. A system that consistently fails to see stalking for what it is.

The failure has a pattern. Research identifies five distinct types of stalker, with different motivations, different methods, and different prior relationships with their victims. The system has been trained, in its culture and its risk assessment tools, to recognise one of them. The others it misses. And the type it is most likely to miss is also the type most likely to use the criminal justice system itself as a tool of the campaign.

This piece sets out what the research shows, what the data tells us about who gets stalked and by whom, and why the gap between what stalking is and what institutions think it looks like causes direct and serious harm to victims.

The foundational academic research into stalker types was developed by Paul Mullen, Michele Pathé, Rosemary Purcell and Geoffrey Stuart in 1999, based on a study of 145 stalkers referred to a forensic psychiatry centre for treatment. It remains the standard framework in the field, endorsed by the British Psychological Society, adopted by the Crown Prosecution Service in its legal guidance on stalking and harassment, and used as the basis for the Stalking Risk Profile assessment tool.

The research identifies five types, organised along two dimensions. The first is the motivation driving the stalking. The second is the prior relationship between stalker and victim. The five types are not mutually exclusive and stalkers can move between them or exhibit features of more than one. But the distinctions matter for how cases are identified, risk-assessed, and prosecuted.

The Mullen framework's two axes matter as much as the five categories themselves. The prior relationship axis reveals that stalking is not predominantly an intimate partner phenomenon. In Mullen's original sample, only 30% of victims were ex-partners. Professional contacts accounted for 23%, work contacts 11%, and strangers 14%. Approximately half of all stalking is against someone who is not, and has never been, an intimate partner.

That finding has direct implications for how police assess risk and identify behaviour. Risk assessment tools designed primarily around domestic abuse and intimate partner stalking will systematically underestimate risk in cases that do not fit that template.

The resentful stalker is the type most likely to be misidentified by police. Not because they are harder to find, but because they are harder to read. Their behaviour is purposeful, organised, and self-justifying in ways that can appear coherent to an institution that has not been trained to look beneath the surface.

The resentful stalker believes they have been wronged. The wrongdoing may be real or imagined, significant or trivial. What matters is that they have constructed a narrative in which their target is the aggressor and they are the victim. That narrative is not performed insincerely. Many resentful stalkers genuinely believe it. It is this sincere self-belief that makes them so effective at deploying it.

The CPS legal guidance on stalking and harassment explicitly distinguishes the resentful type: resentful stalkers set out to frighten and distress the victim to exact revenge for an actual or supposed injury, and are differentiated from rejected stalkers precisely because the cause of their resentment does not lie in rejection from an intimate relationship.

The methods used by resentful stalkers reflect the self-justifying logic of their campaign. They may make formal complaints about their victim to employers, professional bodies, or police. They may file civil claims. They may contact the victim's family, friends, or colleagues with accounts of the victim's conduct designed to damage relationships and reputation. They may make reports to police alleging they are the victim of harassment by the person they are targeting.

Each of these actions has the appearance of legitimate recourse. A complaint to an employer looks like a workplace grievance. A civil claim looks like a legal dispute. A report to police looks like a victim seeking protection. The stalking infrastructure is built from institutional processes that are individually unremarkable. It only becomes visible as what it is when someone looks at the pattern over time, not at individual incidents.

DARVO was first described by psychologist Jennifer Freyd in 1997. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. In individual interactions it is a manipulation tactic. In institutional settings it becomes something more embedded and harder to see.

The resentful stalker is not merely DARVO-capable. They are the type most structurally positioned to deploy it effectively within institutional systems, for several reasons.

First, they have a coherent narrative. The resentful stalker has been rehearsing their account of events. They know what happened, in the version they have constructed. When they present to police, they present with clarity and consistency. Their victim, who is reacting to what is being done to them, presents with distress, fragmentation, and the difficulty that trauma survivors have in presenting linearly and calmly. The institution reads strategy as credibility and reaction as unreliability.

Second, they reach the institution first. Making a report to police is itself part of the resentful stalker's campaign. It is not a response to escalation. It is an escalation. By reporting first, the resentful stalker establishes a record that exists before the victim has had any opportunity to provide context. The victim, when they subsequently report, is now contradicting an existing account rather than making a primary one.

Third, they perform victimhood convincingly. The resentful stalker genuinely believes in the justice of their cause. That sincerity is legible. An institution looking for signs of fabrication will not find them, because the resentful stalker is not fabricating. They are reporting their reality. Their reality is distorted, but the distortion is their own.

of stalking reports resulted in a charge, year ending March 2022

5%

investigations dropped for evidential difficulties, victim supporting action

30,000

recommendations from the joint super complaint investigation, September 2024

29

of online stalking cases involved the stalker targeting the victim's children too

73%

The Suzy Lamplugh Trust submitted the super complaint on behalf of the National Stalking Consortium in November 2022. The joint IOPC, HMICFRS and College of Policing investigation reported in September 2024, finding clear evidence to support all grounds of the complaint.

The following cases are concluded prosecutions and matters of public record.

The public image of the stalker is male. That image reflects a real statistical pattern. Women account for approximately 12 to 25% of stalkers in research studies, varying by setting. But the assumption that stalking is a male behaviour causes real harm. It means victims of female stalkers are less likely to be believed. It means gay and bisexual victims of same-sex stalking encounter a system with no template for their experience. And it means women who are reported to police by a resentful male stalker find the institution already oriented against them.

CPS data published in 2025 shows stalking prosecutions reached their highest level on record in 2024-25, at 7,168 cases. More than eight in ten of those cases were also flagged as domestic abuse related. The system is still processing stalking predominantly through an intimate partner lens, which means stalking by women and same-sex stalking remain at the edges of institutional awareness.

Mullen and colleagues' 2001 study of 40 female stalkers found important differences from the male pattern. Female stalkers were significantly more likely to target other women. They were significantly more likely to target professional contacts, particularly healthcare providers, teachers, and legal practitioners. They were more likely to use telephone and written contact rather than physical pursuit. They were less likely to have criminal histories. And they were just as likely as male stalkers to threaten their victims.

The distribution across stalker types also differed from the male pattern. 45% of the female sample were intimacy seekers, most targeting professional contacts with whom they had developed a fixed belief in a bond. 25% were rejected stalkers. 18% were resentful stalkers, most commonly emerging from workplace disputes. Research into cyberstalking has suggested that the motivation for female stalkers is often an extension of bullying by same-sex peers, in contrast to the obsession or retaliation pattern more commonly found in male stalkers.

The College of Policing has an active research project specifically examining stalking by women and whether policing practices, policies, and protective measures respond to it as effectively as they do to stalking by men. The fact that this research is still needed in 2025 is itself a measure of the gap.

Trans and non-binary people: the data gap and the reality

The Crime Survey for England and Wales does not collect data on trans victims. That absence is not neutral. It means the national picture of stalking victimisation excludes a group that research consistently identifies as among the most heavily targeted.

Analysis of Home Office hate crime data found that stalking and harassment offences form the largest category of violence against the person in transphobic hate crime, at 1,727 recorded offences in the most recent year. Reported stalking and harassment against trans people has increased by 337% since 2017-18. But reporting has collapsed. Galop estimated the non-reporting rate at 86% in 2020. More recent analysis suggests it may be as high as 90%. The recorded data therefore captures only a fraction of what is actually happening.

Galop's research into domestic abuse within LGBT communities found that trans men disclose disproportionately higher levels of harassment and stalking compared to other groups. Two in five trans people reported experiencing a hate crime or incident in the previous twelve months. The Stonewall LGBT in Britain Trans Report includes a direct account from a trans man who had been stalked for over two years by an unknown person sending anonymous threatening letters.

The reasons for low reporting mirror what is documented throughout this piece. Distrust of police. Disbelief. A system with no template for the experience being described. Trans and non-binary people who report stalking to police may find their identity itself becomes a focus of the interaction rather than the harm they are reporting. Galop runs the UK's National LGBTQ+ Hate Crime Helpline and provides specialist support where the formal system has failed.

Same-sex stalking and what the data shows

CSEW data analysed by UCL and published in 2025 found that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are more than twice as likely to be cyberstalked compared to heterosexual people. Research published in the British Journal of Criminology found that in same-sex stalking cases, the motivation is more often grievance-based, mapping directly onto the resentful type. This makes same-sex stalking particularly likely to involve the mechanisms this piece documents: a self-justifying campaign framed as accountability, and an offender who presents to institutions as the wronged party.

Home Office data shows gay men are more than twice as likely as heterosexual men to be victims of domestic abuse. Research by SurvivorsUK found that of gay and bisexual men who reported sexual violence to police, nearly a third said they felt disbelieved or that their complaint was not taken seriously. There are no published stalking prosecution statistics broken down by the sexual orientation of victim and offender. That gap is itself significant. The system cannot respond to patterns it does not record.

When the stalker is a woman: two documented cases

These cases are not exceptional. They are underdiscussed. The BPS notes that research into female same-sex stalking is among the least developed areas of the field. Victims of female stalkers describe finding their accounts disbelieved or minimised because the person doing it to them does not match what people expect a stalker to look like. That disbelief is not only a social problem. It appears in police responses, in risk assessments, and in charging decisions.