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Hello and welcome to part 86,747,398,464 of the continuing cataloguing via television documentary of the apparently infinite series Ways in Which Largely Men Terrorise Largely Women and Prevent Countless Millions of Them from Living Their Lives in Freedom and Contentment. This one comprises two episodes and is entitled To Catch a Stalker.
It comes from the corporation’s most youth-oriented arm, BBC Three, which mandates a telegenic presenter better versed in sympathy with the programme’s interviewees than interrogation of wider issues, and who has usually come up through the ranks of reality TV rather than journalism. Here, it’s Zara McDermott (Love Island, Made in Chelsea, The X Factor: Celebrity), who previously fronted entries in the infinite series on “revenge porn”, rape culture and eating disorders.
We meet survivors (although this suggests their ordeals are at an end, which for none of them is the case – but to call them victims would be to diminish what McDermott rightly emphasises as their extraordinary strength and endurance) of different forms of stalking.
Jen has endured the obsessive attentions of a man with whom she briefly crossed professional paths during her work for a recruitment company. It began with a few friendly texts and rapidly escalated to bombardment at all hours with insistent messages about their imminent relationship (“I am the guy you’re looking for. You just don’t recognise it”), naked pictures of himself and – as Jen continued not to respond to this stranger – fury. He repeatedly parked in places she was likely to pass and when the police eventually became involved – which has led to four convictions and three prison sentences for the man – they found multiple searches on his computer for pornographic lookalikes of Jen. She is now counting down the days until he is released from his latest stint in jail with dread. As McDermott says: “I don’t know how she sleeps at night.” It’s likely that she doesn’t. Jen shakes with nerves and has a terrible hunted look about her – because that is exactly what is happening to her. She is the prey of a predator who apparently cannot be stopped.
No more, it seems, than any of them can with the current paltry tools at the law’s disposal – presuming you can find someone willing to wield them in the first place. All the women interviewed speak of police reluctance to take their experiences seriously.
Twenty-year-old Isabel, who has moved five times to try to escape the terrifying attentions of her ex-boyfriend, no longer bothers to call the police when she sees a man, whom she assumes to be him, watching her from the alleyway behind her latest home, because they dropped her case when the original investigating officer left. “If you don’t help me, he’s going to kill me,” she told them. Apparently it fell on closed ears. Maybe they thought she was hysterical. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you can think of a good enough reason for ignoring a young woman and her toddler trapped in their home because a man has decided he will not let her go. “He knows what he’s done,” she says. “And he knows he’s got away with it. So what is he going to do next?” The best safety plan a charity has been able to give her if he forces his way into her home is to drop from her balcony to the car park roof below and from there to the ground – she will not be able to take her son with her – then contact a neighbour or flag down a passing car.
Victims’ (sufferers’, survivors’) family members attest to the fear and anxiety that stalkers induce in them all. Next week, the remit expands to consider the effects of cyberstalking (“Just ignore it” seems to be the most popular recommendation), and continues to document more women’s experiences with the flesh-and-blood kind of stalker, who message their targets 500 times a day and draw their fingers across throats from afar (far enough that they do not get returned to prison for breaching non-molestation orders), and so on and appallingly on.
It is a documentary designed to raise awareness rather than provide answers, but you do long for a little examination of context; for someone to ask whether this would be so prevalent without, say, an existing culture of male entitlement, or within a society that valued women’s lives and freedom as highly as anyone else’s. If we didn’t have a police force known to be as riddled with bad apples and systemic sexism as it is. If, if, if.
