Dr Ciara Staunton found the Baby Reindeer series 'a hard watch', noting that it was less typical in that it was a man being targeted by a stranger. Photograph: Netflix
“It is only a matter of time before he will up his game,” she says. “They fear the time that he is going to not just park outside the door, but come in. And that will happen.” O’Reilly points out that advances in technology mean stalking has become much more sophisticated than “just someone hiding in the bushes outside your door”.
Sonya Fitzmaurice, O’Reilly’s colleague at Longford Women’s Link, says stalking regularly takes the form of simply turning up everywhere the target is, whether that is in the supermarket or at the GAA club when the children are training. I know of one girl who had to leave a rural area because the person stalking her was very popular and the attitude was that ‘he would not do that’The group set up an inter-agency forum comprising local gardaí, HSE staff and other frontline workers to co-ordinate a response to domestic abuse.
Of the 892 cases analysed by the UCC team, 9 per cent were male and 257 of the perpetrators were strangers with the majority – some 468 – partners or former partners, while 206 described their stalkers as “acquaintances”. Some 131 were described as “friends” and 107 as work colleagues. “It is about power and control. It is about terrifying somebody,” said Mary Crilly of Cork’s Sexual Violence Centre.
“So people end up for the sake of their mental health moving away. And very often they don’t get away because if he wants to keep control he will finds ways of doing it”.“I thought it was great for raising awareness. It showed how difficult it can be to get out of it, how delusional the other party can be,” she says.Crilly says the show reflects how people worry about offending the stalker or initially feel sorry for them.