The Abolistionist and Her Stalker

In my frst-ever politics class, my lecturer challenged us to pick a topic, any topic, and he would make it political. Everything has to do with politics, he would argue. As I complete my fnal year, I have to wonder what he would have said fve years ago if I had put my hand up and said, ‘stalking’. While discussions around gendered violence are more prevalent than ever, stalking is rarely talked about outside of mid-tier crime procedurals. Stalking is a type of harassment involving repeated, inappropriate contact that is unwanted and unreciprocated; it almost always constitutes emotional abuse. It is an incredibly gendered crime, with approximately 85% of stalkers being male – and, despite its absence from our conversations surrounding gendered violence, a woman is just as likely to be stalked in her lifetime as she is to experience sexual violence. I knew my stalker. He is a student here at Flinders, and he probably sat in that exact same politics class. Over the year and a half, I knew him he frequently displayed alarming behaviour towards women. He would expose female classmates to pornography, hint at sexual kinks; fetishize Asian and Eastern European women and their cultures; and paint any woman who dared to reject him as mentally unstable and fundamentally damaged. Eventually, his behaviour towards me grew disturbing. He would obsess over my partner, vacillating between adoring him and competing with him; he would attempt to insert himself into our lives and join in on our dates; he would show up at my workplace whenever I was rostered alone; and he would attend my classes without being enrolled. Frequently, women would approach me when I was with him, friends and strangers alike, to check that I was ok – that is how unhinged his behaviour towards me often became.

Finally, my partner stepped in and asked that he leave us alone; it was our anniversary that day and we had been having lunch together when he once again inserted himself into our date. He became livid at this boundary and began bombarding me with messages disparaging my partner and threatening me, warning me to be ‘more careful’ in how I spoke to him. This incident was the frst time his behaviour towards me fully clicked, and for the rest of the day I just couldn’t shake the pit in my stomach. Eventually, he sent me a list of demands and suggested I break up with my partner. I blocked that day. In the eight months since, has never once stopped trying to contact me or reinsert himself in my life. I have had to block him on every platform – Facebook, Instagram, my high-school Snapchat account, TikTok, even my emails. Following the initial block, he went on a smear campaign against my partner, and spread a false narrative about why I had blocked him. would manipulate mutual friends and acquaintances into providing him access to me; forcing me to either divulge deeply private and triggering information or be complicit in his lies and his narrative. Stalking is a deeply contextual crime and that makes it both isolating and completely paralysing. For months after this situation began, I constantly felt anxious and on-edge. It is always frightening, as a woman, to realise that a man has no respect for your autonomy or your boundaries. Whenever a new piece of information made its way back to me, I felt physically sick. What left me reeling seemed innocuous to those around me, and I felt alone in my fear. Academically, I stopped showing up and participating in my tutorials because I couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t be there. In online classes, the idea that he could see me, hear me speak, and engage with me under the guise of academia, flled me with dread; and many times, I would have to log of when he began speaking. This didn’t stop him, and several times academic schedules were coincidently changed at the last minute to place us in the same location at the same time. Socially, I

couldn’t attend events because he might have been there; I couldn’t engage with on-campus clubs because he was actively involved in them. I distanced myself from my cohort because of their proximity to ; and the closeness to me that that proximity aforded

Eventually, after months of telling myself that it wasn’t that bad, his complete disregard for my boundaries left me feeling so unsafe that I reached out to an old friend who had witnessed this person’s behaviour towards another woman. I asked him directly if he genuinely thought I was in danger. He said yes. In the wake of that answer, I was left with another question – well, what can I actually do about that? I consider myself to be an abolitionist; I do not believe in the carceral system’s ability or desire to protect victims or provide any meaningful justice. The reality is if I were to seek and receive ‘justice’ through our current system, it would likely rob a person of their autonomy, their education and the chance to change. The carceral system causes harm to all involved, and when I advocate for its dissolution, I don’t believe that I myself am excluded from that. The fght for restorative justice does not rest solely with systems, institutions or simply someone else. It rests with me. This is a person I cared for, and I simply cannot reconcile that. What I can reckon with, however, is the system that allowed this to happen. Because it is rarely ever the stalker, or the abuser, themselves that traps people in these situations. More often than not, it is the systems we have in place that allow this behaviour to continue.

My stalker was the

. behaviour towards me occurred partially within this system; and while random women would willingly intervene on my behalf to protect me, his own party remained silent and allowed his behaviour to continue without repercussion. Heads of his faction were present while he stalked me, threw cultural insults at me, lied about my relationship, and slandered my partner. They openly acknowledged distubring behaviour towards me; hell, they even gossiped about it at party conferences.

After I cut ties, they continued to invite to their parties, drink alongside him and on multiple occasions encouraged his attempts to contact me. They even put in a good word for him for a job within . It was in their silence that he maintained power. But they can’t have mine. One of the key pieces of advice given to victims of stalking is to tell everybody. It is through community that we can fnd safety. In 1971, the New York Radical Feminists convened a ‘rape speak out’ where hundreds gathered to witness 40 women give testimony to their experiences of gendered violence. Alix Kate Shulam described this as ‘expressing outrage – the outness of rage’. So here I am, telling everybody and outing my rage; for how I was treated and for how I was not protected by a

I know as I write this my stalker and will read it. Truthfully, I am afraid of what that could mean. But transformative justice asks how we can respond to harm without creating more harm, and it also asks us how we can actively work to cultivate safety, connection and transparency in our own communities; and frankly that work begins with some very difcult conversations.