Read the Women Blog!
Read the Women Blog
November 12, 2007
I just heard the story of a woman who discovered that her husband had been tracking her daily movements, thanks to GPS technology, synchronized to a regular mobile phone. Stories abound of women whose partners have bombarded their emails with pornographic images and insulting messages. After all, abuse usually comes by the hands of someone known to the victim. Most stalkers know their prey.
With more than 194 million mobile phones and over 212 million Internet users in the United States, cyber stalking and wireless terrorism against women is abuse that demands immediate safeguards. Because cyber stalkers know that emails, voice and text messages can easily be tracked, they have become technologically astute. Web sites offering technology to track and harass their current and former partners, including track-your-partner.com and getrevengeonyourex.com, offer tools to perform the stalking in an anonymous way.
The advancement of global modern communications technology has changed the fundamentals of our lives. Mobile phones are increasingly important to reporting unsafe situations and seeking police help. Who imagined that ubiquitous wireless phones, GPS devices and e-mails would open a new frontier of psychological abuse for women?! Their portability, user friendliness and inconspicuous size, in the hands of abusive partners, facilitate the cowardly purposes to physically confronting their victim or navigating the vagaries of tailgating. A few clicks can get the job done.
Stalking by technology leaves wounds that are difficult to heal. In 2006, during focus group discussions in five cities with over 100 adult and teenage women of diverse background, age and ethnicity, CFAW learned that verbal, emotional and psychological hostility abuse is far more damaging to women’s self-esteem. The effects persist long after the relationship ends. Yet, only thirty percent of female victims seek psychological counsel after being stalked.
Because cyber stalking does not entail a physical encounter, some might not consider it abusive, even viewing it as acts of concern. Unfortunately, abusive behavior rarely ends with stalking. According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, 81 percent of women who were stalked by a current or former husband or partner were also physically assaulted by that partner, and 31 percent were also sexually assaulted.
Women must connect this threat in their daily lives to the importance of national policy as an important channel to combat it in society. By passing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Congress made a major commitment to eradicate domestic violence. By extending it, in 2005, to make cyber stalking and harassing a federal crime, government, violence prevention groups and law enforcement agencies can allocate more resources to addressing the issue. President Bush signed VAWA into law in 2006, and it is now crucial that Congress votes to fully fund its programs.
Society’s understanding and recognition of emotional, psychological and verbal abuse as devastating to women is key to changing values that tolerate non-physical violence. Unfortunately, nationally representative research and broad media coverage of information-age weapons are scant. Unfortunately, teenagers are the most vulnerable. Earlier this year, a national online survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited for Liz Claiborne Inc., among 1,029 teenagers, illuminated an alarming use of mobile phones among youth to stalk, bully and threaten one another.
More research and national public information campaigns must be launched to understand how women experience and cope with psychological, emotional and verbal abuse, including cyber stalking and e-mail-based harassment, and to build awareness of their harmful consequences. CFAW plans to conduct a nationally representative survey, in which we will ask 1,800 women and 200 teenagers about intimate partner abuse and sexual assault. Technological methods used against women will be specifically examined. It is crucial to understand women’s individual experiences with emotional abuse, as well as the way they connect these issues with attitudes toward policy, advocacy and the political activism that’s needed to eradicate it. As with all of our research, CFAW will deploy informational tools and mass media advocacy campaigns to raise widespread awareness of our findings.
It is time to take emotional, psychological and verbal abuse more seriously. Through evidence-based advocacy and national public information campaigns, CFAW will continue to promote changes in the values that tolerate all forms of abuse against women.
If you have been a victim of cyber stalking, take a moment and share your story.
dwemaphypevap says
Some one has quueezed me some backseats that were sled comparable night. He rosigen two attendants into her nightmare and moved them in and out, forming her ineffectual sensors and images of pamela anderson her striped and prudent lips.
jamal khan says
jo me
one day
Kathleen says
Hi, I am Kathleen Luppi, from the Orange County Register. Below is a link that I think your readers will find interest in because it is about a woman that became Orange County’s sheriff. Please feel free to link to our site. Thank you in advance!
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/city-women-female-2065998-hutchens-male