The Wrong Kind of Victim

Each factor, individually, creates a credibility gap. Together, they create a chasm. This piece maps the templates: the ideal-victim assumption, the ideal-offender assumption, digital competence, trauma responses, mental health, economic vulnerability, and perpetrator social capital.

Nils Christie's 1986 concept of the ideal victim, weak, blameless, unconnected to the offender, entirely passive, remains the foundational framework. Research consistently shows that victims who fit the profile receive more sympathetic responses than those who do not. Brenik et al (2025) found that the need for police intervention was rated highest in cases involving a male offender and a female victim, and lowest where the genders were reversed.

Christie's framework has a mirror. If the ideal victim is weak, passive and helpless, the ideal offender is threatening, chaotic and socially marginal. A perpetrator who does not fit that profile benefits from a parallel assumption. Sheridan et al (2001), the first UK stalking victim survey, found that stalkers had higher socio-economic status than most other criminals. The default offender profile does not fit the reality of who stalks people.

The system expects a victim of cyberstalking to be passive, distressed, and technically helpless. What it encounters instead, in many cases, is someone who has documented everything: preserved screenshots, tracked accounts, cross-referenced IP data, and submitted detailed evidence packages. Someone who understands the technical dimensions of their case better than the officer taking their statement.

Short et al (2026) studied 53 cyberstalking victims whose police investigations were closed. Three themes emerged: delayed reporting due to anticipated disbelief; complaints dismissed or undermined when made; victims actively contributing evidence but feeling unsupported when police failed to follow up. The behaviours a victim adopts to survive and document their experience, meticulous record keeping, technical analysis, persistent reporting, are the same behaviours that, when misread, look like obsession, sophistication, or coercion.

Trauma produces responses that the system reads as evidence against the victim. Inconsistency in accounts. Delayed reporting. Continued contact with the perpetrator. Emotional flatness when describing what happened. Apparent overreaction to minor triggers. Every one of these is also, in the hands of a perpetrator who understands how the system works, a line of attack on the victim's credibility.

Barlow and Walklate (2025) examined misidentification of victim and perpetrator in policing responses to coercive and controlling behaviour. Their five factors, manipulation, misidentification, miscommunication, misunderstanding, and minimisation, document precisely how perpetrators use the criminal justice process against their victims and how the system fails to detect it.