Gendered Emotional and Behavioral Reactions to Stalking

• In Event: Gender-Based and Sexual Violence Victimization

Abstract

Stalking is a serious crime and can be a precursor to physical violence. As a result, stalking tends to evoke a strong emotional response and often leads victims to reorganize their day-to-day activities. While stalking has serious consequences for all victims, research suggests that women victims are particularly likely to experience negative emotions and to modify their behavior to avoid stalking-related physical violence. We expand on this research by testing theoretically derived hypotheses about gendered patterns of emotional responses to stalking and also examining whether particular emotional responses to stalking mediate the effects of gender on self-protective behaviors. We use data from the 2019 National Crime Victimization Supplemental Victimization Survey (SVS) (n=5080) to test our hypotheses. We found that women victims of stalking are more likely than men victims to report all four negative emotions included in the SVS (depression, anxiety, anger, and fear) in response to the victimization event. We also found that the number of negative emotions reported significantly predicted the number of self-protective behaviors. In addition, the overall count of negative emotions fully mediated the effects of gender on self-protective behaviors. These results indicate that emotions play a fundamental role in women’s behavioral responses to stalking.

Authors

• Jody Clay-Warner, University of Georgia

• Ziding Shen, University of Georgia