Cyberstalking and the technologies of interpersonal terrorism

Abstract

Despite extensive popular press coverage of the dark side of the internet, apparently no social scientific research has yet been published on the topic of cyberstalking. This report summarizes three pilot studies conducted in the process of developing a satisfactory factorially complex measure of cyberstalking victimization, and then investigates the incidence of such victimization, and its interrelationships to obsessive relational intrusion. Findings indicate that cyberstalking is experienced by a nontrivial proportion of the sample, and that there are small but generally consistent relationships between facets of cyberstalking and spatially based stalking. In addition, the results suggested that only interactional forms of coping were related consistently with forms of cyberstalking.