Monday, September 06, 2010

Organized Stalking Must Stop

Interesting article on the topic and worth the read.


According to a 2009 Department of Justice survey of stalking victims, 6.5 percent responded that the number of offenders is unknown (while 13.1 percent responded that the number is three or more). The stalking of one individual by a multitude of people (too large to identify) is called organized stalking, cause-stalking or gang-stalking.

Private investigator David Lawson, licensed in the U.S. and Canada, investigated organized stalking cases for 20 years by identifying and "joining" perpetrators' groups and wrote a booklet, "Cause Stalking." According to this book, hundreds of people are taught that the stalking target is the reason for their problems. Those who can spy on and/or assault the target are told maliciously false gossip about the target and bribed with cash or illegal drugs into carrying out the mission. The perpetrators are ordinary people, including janitors in apartments who have keys to get into locked doors and taxi drivers who can "patrol" the road while they are on the job.

Derrick Robinson, the president of Freedom from Covert Harassment and Surveillance, has interacted with over 1,000 targeted individuals in the last five years. He says the attacks are often engineered to make the target's experience resemble the diagnosis of the persecutory delusional disorder or paranoid schizophrenia. This way, real delusional reports make real organized stalking cases less credible. A grand legal loophole is thus created.

Robinson and Lawson say a similar course of conduct is directed at most targets, which includes organized perjury (many people file false allegations of a kind of a crime that is hard to prove against one target), electromagnetic assault, repeated break-ins, phone and computer inception, stolen airmails, repeated nonlethal poisoning and toxic gassing (of the target's residence). According to Lawson, criminal organizations and hate groups are often hired to coordinate organized stalking by those who attempt to undermine the psychiatric reliability of the target (because the target filed a police report against them, is a threat or scapegoat to them, and so forth).

Certain provisions in the state penal code (including stalking, soliciting a crime and assault) can punish the courses of conduct of organized stalking. Yet the deeds are committed in a premeditated manner, leaving no visible evidence (this is why a loner without any co-witnessing family members nearby is often targeted, according to Lawson).

Consequently, according to Robinson, law enforcement personnel (and psychiatrists) assume that the target imagines victimization, and decide not to intervene, resulting in the victim's severe and unnecessary (yet invisible) injuries. Lawson says the victim cannot escape even if he or she moves to another continent, because the local gangs of the new place will be hired to continue the mission. Understandably, 11 percent of the victims reported being stalked for five years or more, according to the Justice Department's survey.

Tomo Shibata, Ph.D. is founding and presiding in a nonprofit organization, Ending Organized Stalking, in Ithaca, and can be contacted at ts24@cornell.edu.

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