By Linh Tat

Daily Bruin Staff

Educators and law enforcement agencies are concerned that too many stalkers never get caught because victims don’t know how to handle this non-traditional criminal offense.

Scott Gordon, deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, informed university employees during an anti-stalking program Thursday how a case is legally recognized as stalking.

The difficulty with stalking cases is that victims do not always recognize a potentially harmful incident when it occurs, Gordon said.

“Stalking is not one big crime; it’s a series of incidents that, taken by themselves, do not seem like a big deal, but you must look at the picture as a whole,” Gordon said.

Further complicating matters is that victims sometimes have difficulty removing themselves emotionally from their stalkers because in some cases they were once involved romantically.

In 61 percent of stalking cases, the victim was previously married to or had dated their stalker, according to statistics from the D.A.’s office.

“There aren’t that many crimes that start with the words ‘I love you,’” Gordon said. “You start with a wonderful relationship that goes wrong.”

In order for the D.A.’s office to recognize a case as stalking, the incidents reported to police must meet all of the following criteria: The victim must have experienced repeated harassments; the stalker has made credible threats against the safety of the victim or their immediate family and friends; and the stalker’s actions were intended to scare the victim.

Gordon said victims should keep a log of each time the stalker attempts to contact them. Rather than deleting an unopened e-mail or erasing a message from the answering machine, he said the victim should turn the information in to police.

“Documentation is key. The more you can save the better,” he said.

The program was part of a “Love Me Not” anti-stalking campaign headed by the D.A.’s office and the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women.

“This ... new anti-stalking collaboration uniting prosecution, law enforcement and education is the first program of its kind in the nation,” L.A. District Attorney Gil Garcetti said in a statement.

“(It combines) expertise from all available resources in a single place to provide multifaceted assistance to victims and to deter stalkers by raising awareness of the criminally punitive consequences of their behavior,” Garcetti said in the statement.

Thursday’s program was sponsored by various campus organizations, including the Women’s Resource Center, Student Psychological and Legal Services, and the Office of the Dean of Students.

Violence in the workplace, one of the program’s main concerns, is most common at a large organization such as UCLA, Gordon said.

Drawing correlations between domestic and workplace violence, Gordon said that victims who leave their abuser often find the latter looking for them at their workplace.

With the growing use of the Internet, university officials have also seen a marked increase in cyberstalking cases.

“The problem with computers is that you don’t realize who you’re talking to,” said Tina Oakland, director of the WRC.

“People tend to feel more comfortable about giving out the more intimate details of themselves over the computer because they feel anonymous,” she continued. “We encourage students to monitor the content and amount of information they share with strangers.”

The average age of stalkers is 38 years and more than half of the victims are between 18 and 29 years old, according to the D.A.’s office.

Oakland said plans are under way to create a threat assessment team made up of members from various organizations to determine what course of actions are best for individual stalking cases.