Courting Disaster: Intimate Stalking, Culture and Criminal Justice(Social Problems & Social Issues)

This work is a wide-ranging and sensitive examination of the lived experience of intimate stalking victimization. It explores how it feels and what it means to be stalked by a former intimate and how this situation creates dilemmas for victims and their advocates. What is it like to try to become a "victim" in the eyes of the law and then to remain one, when almost anything a woman does to manage the violent emotions of an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend can backfire and discredit her claims? The author draws upon a broad array of rich data, including a survey of college women, courtroom testimony, prosecutors' case files, interviews with victims and observations in a prosecutor's office and a stalking survivor's support group to illustrate the difficulties women face as they work to cope with danger - and to negotiate the hazardous terrain of legal systems - simultaneously. For some victims, Dunn shows, prosecution processes are more traumatic than the events that brought them to seek legal help and her analysis of the historical, cultural and gendered frameworks in which stalking victimization and prosecution takes place accounts for the additional trauma. Definitions of situations and identities are contested rather than given in these arenas where lives and self-concepts rest in the balance. The ways in which we socially construct and confer meaning upon intimate violence and its victims profoundly shape what happens to ordinary women facing extraordinary circumstances. "Courting Disaster" illuminates what we can learn from their experience, whether we are working in these arenas or theorizing about how they do, and sometimes do not, work.

Table of Contents:
Pursuing Justice: Setting the Stage for Intimate Victimisation Stalking; I'll Be Watching You: The Lived Experience of Intimate Stalking; Innocence Lost: Accomplishing Victimization in the domestic Violence Unit; A Romantic Interlude: Cultural Constructions of Courtship and Compliance; Damned If You Do: Social Problems Work, Emotion Work, and the Worthy Victim

About the Author :
Jennifer Dunn (University Of Illinois, Urbana)

Review :

-Dunn's analysis of the challenges women encounter as they seek help while simultaneously living with the experience of stalking reveals the inadequacy of current criminal justice interventions. In an intriguing analysis of how victims do -emotion work- in their interactions with stalkers, Dunn shows that victims sometimes temporarily comply with their stalkers' demands to feel safe or because they are convinced by their former partners' professions of love. At other times, they avoid interactions or fight back.- --Kristin L. Anderson, Gender and Society -Stalking behavior has only recently been defined as deviant behavior. With the passage of the first anti-stalking statute in 1990, stalking became illegal, and researchers began to examine the nature of and criminological motivations behind stalking... [This book] provides useful information on stalking and its victims and convincing critiques that suggest various ways in which law enforcement practitioners could improve their understanding of stalking and better deal with the problems that might stem from traumatic situations in legal processing... The book is well organized and includes thought-provoking pictures.- --Jungmi Kim, Contemporary Sociology -In Courting Disaster, Jennifer Dunn demonstrates that the constructionist perspective can be fruitful and can provide insights for both addressing real-world policy problems and grappling with theoretical issues. And she shows us that it is possible to be simultaneously an advocate for a cause and a serious, sophisticated social scientist with a passion for finding out how things work.- --Erich Goode, Symbolic Interaction