SAVING STALKERS

Charlotte Cripps hears the story behind one man’s descent into obsession and how intervention programmes mean offenders can be reconditioned and reintroduced into society

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When John*, 40, found out that his partner had cheated on him, the mental obsession about why she’d done it began to consume him. They continued to live with each other, but after 13 months he left their shared property on England’s south coast to live elsewhere, and his mindset got worse. “It messed with my head a lot,” says John. “When it sunk in, I started to drink heavily.” Then when his ex-partner finally cut all contact, it exploded. “I wanted the answers,” he tells me.

He bombarded her for four months last summer with “20 unwanted emails a day”, he tells me, calling her endlessly, leaving voice messages, and checking her social media, as well sending texts to her friend to find out what she was up to. “My behaviour became disgusting really,” he reflects.

His former partner finally went to the police. It was a shock, he says, when he was arrested for stalking. In his eyes, it was his ex who was in the wrong for cheating on him.

“If I hadn’t been arrested, my behaviour would have escalated to another level to becoming a ‘proper stalker’ – it would have got the better of me,” he admits in hindsight, mentioning the more traditional view of stalking behaviours that might have come into play, such as turning up at her house, as the next step.

He is lucky that it was caught in time. He voluntarily opted to attend 12 therapy sessions at a stalker clinic in Hampshire, funded by the county’s Police and Crime Commissioner, rather than get a stalking conviction after he was arrested in October 2024. Since he has been in therapy for his stalking behaviour, he has discovered it was due to his traumatic childhood. “I couldn’t close the chapter on it [his childhood trauma],” he explains about the fact he was “never loved” as a child.