What Organized Stalking Is

This is a essay forwarded from Eleanor White:

While the average 21st Century citizen prefers not to think
about this crime syndrome, stalking groups have been using
"civilian psychological warfare" on their targets now for at
least two decades.

And talking about this taboo topic brings a very heavy "don't
spoil my day" response. People not affected simply refuse to
listen to information on stalking by more than one stalker.
Kind of like the way folks don't like hearing about cancer.

In the early 1990s, legal jursidictions in both the United
States and Canada finally enacted legislation making stalking a
crime. But to society's detriment, justice systems everywhere
seamlessly ignore every case where a group of stalkers engage in
the same behaviour as single stalkers. The reason isn't clear,
but it may have to do with the rather substantial amount of
investigative labour required when a group takes turns doing
"little nasties" against a target. Who is the perpetrator?

That the stalkers are generally not career criminals makes going
after stalking group members a substantial project for the
justice system. Some of the stalkers have considerable respect
in their communities.

Today's stalking groups use very carefully planned harassment
methods. Every single act of harassment is carefully designed
so that it is in the "life's normal breaks" category. What the
target sees are "normal breaks" which usually occur maybe once
or twice a month on average, to maybe once a year. But for
organized stalking targets, such "normal breaks" happen at least
once, and often several times a DAY.

This "life's normal breaks" format of the crime also adds to the
difficulty of investigating and prosecuting organized stalking.
In turn, the apparent normalcy makes it very easy for police and
other officials to brush off complaints of organized stalking as
the target being "mistaken", "overreacting, " or often, "in need
of seeing a good psychiatrist. "

"Life's normal breaks" span a huge range of seriousness.

At the low end you have endless noise from co-opted neighbours
who observe the target and schedule "normal activity" like
running a leaf blower for each time a target may wish to enjoy
peaceful activity. Or scattering the target's mail on their
porch while the target is away at work. Or frequent, make
believe, obviously sarcastic "wrong number" calls.

But at the opposite end of the range, you have surreptitious
entry to the target's home, car and workplace, with sabotage of
belongings, and torture and even the death of pets. One target
came home to find antifreeze in the dog's dish, and the dog
permanently blind. Some pets or wild animals are butchered and
left on the target's doorstep.

It is common, where a target is married, for the stalkers to
carefully harass the target only at times and places when the
target is separated from the partner. This eventually drives
the target to complain, and the usual reaction is "Don't talk
about that any more" or "Go see a psychiatrist right away". The
marriage is then often headed for destruction.

Vicious lies are circulated in the community, and these lies do
not stop. Such lies as the target is a prostitute, a drug user,
a drug dealer, has a long criminal record, or the highly
destructive favourite (applied to both men and women,) the
target is a pedophile.

Sabotage, lies, and harassment happen at the workplace as well,
and it's not unusual for the target to be driven from a job.
Once that happens, when the target looks for another job, the
target is shadowed, and lies are fed to prospective employers.
Some targets have been driven to homelessness, and a few have
been driven to suicide.

So just because activity is confined to "life's normal breaks",
these "breaks" can be devastating and even become life-and-death
issues.

Along with the lies, endless sabotage of individually small, but
cumulatively important belongings accompanies the surreptitious
entries, which are done using locksmithing techniques. The
target effectively owns nothing, because anything he or she owns
is subject to being ruined.

Sabotage is carefully spaced out and held to relatively low
individual value per incident, as are the thefts that also
occur. A great deal of effort is put into planning the sabotage
and thefts, and scheduling them so police will not take the
complaints seriously.

Even the sabotage has a well planned psychological element:
Clothing is often ripped open at sexually significant places
like armpits and crotches. Can you imagine taking your
underwear to the police station to report that someone broke in
and ripped out all the crotches? Do you think the police would
treat that as a crime worthy of their attention?

How long does this go on? With a literal handful of rare
exceptions, for life. Because the stalking groups continue to
recruit and grow indefinitely, there is no "tiring" of the
stalker, as happens in single stalker cases.

To this point, I've briefly highlighted the crime of organized
stalking. Organized stalking is sometimes called "gang
stalking" though the stalking group members generally don't
appear to be affiliated with youth gangs, race gangs, biker
gangs, or say, the Mafia. "Vigilante stalking" is sometimes
used because of the false allegations that targets are active
criminals.

The big question of course, is "Why?" The full answer has yet
to be discovered.

For an individual target, the "Why?" answer relates to the lies
told to the people doing the harassing. There are people in any
neighbourhood or community who enjoy the feeling of self-
righteousness from "helping keeping crime under control", or in
some cases "doing the Lord's work." Tell the right lies, and
it's not hard to recruit harassers.

A second part of the "Why?" question, for which no clear answer
is yet available, is why the leaders of these organized stalking
groups propagate the lies. One author, Florida private
investigator David Lawson, investigated organized stalking
groups for more than a decade, and succeeded in infiltrating
groups in the United States and Canada.

His current book on the subject is "Cause Stalking" and is
available from amazon.com

David Lawson found that the organized stalking group leaders
keep something of an "arm's length" distance from the members,
often passing target designations in ways where the leader can't
be identified, such as a coded classified newspaper ad, or even
a mention on a local radio show.

Lawson reports that leaders are often from "somewhere else" and
claim to have worked in "intelligence" or other difficult to
verify jobs. He was able to interact with stalking group
members, but his information on the leaders is skimpy.

David Lawson did report some corporate funding of these stalking
groups, by corporations who needed ways to deal with people and
groups they consider their "enemies." People like activists and
whistleblowers, or even intellectuals critical of their
activities.

Cases are known where, for example, a wife discovers her husband
is a pedophile and reports him. Inheritance disputes are
understandable. And of course, some organized stalking cases
have resulted from having a marriage or relationship go sour.

Those are reasons why some targets have been selected, but it is
distressing is that there are many targets who do not know why
they were initially chosen.

The reason David Lawson chose "Cause Stalking" as the title of
his current book on the subject is that he found organized
stalking members are often recruited on the basis of some
"cause". Lawson didn't elaborate on the causes used for
recruiting, but did report that once recruited, the "front"
cause is essentially ignored, and the actual work of the group
is to harass "criminals", and perhaps drive them out of the
community.

Lawson reports, and targets concur, that across the U.S. and
Canada, local groups now exist everywhere and the are seamlessly
networked. If a target moves, the group in the new location
will continue the harassment.

David Lawson has done ground-breaking work in exposing the
plight of thousands of organized stalking targets. His
observations are hailed by the targets as "right on the money" -
highly accurate.

And yet, he has missed the mark when it comes to his
conclusions.

Lawson repeatedly lays the blame for organized stalking groups
at the feet of foreign terrorists (the "Al Quaeda" thing,) and,
members of the U.S. Patriot Movement, who, according to their
radio shows, are interested in exposing government crimes and
deviations from the U.S. Consitution. (Lawson calls them "anti
government", but one would think that exposing government crime
is a truly patriotic act.)

Lawson's own observations simply do not show any involvement by
either foreign terrorists or the U.S. Patriot movement. No
connection is visible. That doesn't mean there aren't some
members of either Al-Quaeda or the U.S. Patriot Movement who
also do some organized stalking, but targets don't report a
visible connection with those groups from their experiences.

So, what can be done about the crime of organized stalking?

In the opinion of this writer, all it would take to stop it
would be for organized stalking to become a household word.
That's it. It's that simple.

The problem is that because the justice system consistently
denies the reality, the media has nothing they are willing to
print. If a target approaches reporters, the reporters, under
the gun for accuracy, are very reluctant, though there are small
hints this may be slowly changing.

If the general public were aware of this crime, the pressure on
the justice system would be sufficient to stop it, I claim.

Meanwhile, what can someone who discovers (and that can take
time) that their endless "bad luck" is really organized stalking
do to help themselves?

Right now, there are a precious few, a small minority, of crisis
support organization counselors who do know organized stalking
is "real" and will offer some support. They cannot stop the
crime, nor can they force the reluctant justice system to act to
help the target, but it can make a huge difference just knowing
one person, especially connected with an organization, does
believe the target and does know that organized stalking is a
real crime.

Anti-organized stalking activists need to work harder at
developing connections with those few crisis support counselors,
in the view of this writer.

Perhaps the largest pool of activity among targets is networking
via the Internet. Because destruction of targets' incomes is a
high priority of the stalkers, target activism is rather poorly
funded, but some things are happening. At the moment, I'd like
to recommend googling "organized stalking" (with the quotes) to
readers who may believe their "bad luck" has reached the point
of organized stalking.

Networking doesn't stop the harassment but it can dramatically
improve the outlook for targets.

What can the general public do to help?

Look up organized stalking on the Internet, read what is
available, and above all else, talk it up. The day organized
stalking becomes a household word is the day that this crime
will be properly attended to by justice systems.

Special thanks to readers who have read this article.