As law enforcement struggles to get up to date on stalking laws and stalking patterns of behavior, they are falling way behind on the newest form of domestic terror: cyberstalking. "Batterers will use any tools available to intimidate their victims, track their movements, and maintain control over their activities," says Cindy Southworth, director of technology with the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "It's not hard to see how the Internet and emerging technologies lend themselves to this." Although she declines to give specific details for fear of inadvertently teaching new techniques to stalkers, she points out a recent well-publicized case in Wisconsin where a man stalked his ex-girlfriend with the help of a GPS hidden under the hood of her car. In fact, Southworth recommends that domestic violence and stalking victims use computers at a library or cybercafe as even moderately tech-savvy stalkers can use keystroke-capture devices to monitor home computers for such activities.

But sophisticated stalking technologies such as these often baffle local law enforcement. Many police chiefs and sheriffs are in their 40s and 50s and missed the computer education that is now standard in elementary school; they never caught the wave of information technology, yet they are the ones who determine police department policy, training and emphasis. To compound the problem, state and federal agencies were eager to take charge of cybercrime in its early days, and local police, already overburdened, were happy to pass on the responsibility. Now that there is an epidemic of cybercrime, state and federal agencies can't keep up and the burden has fallen back on the local police to handle problems such as cyberstalking.

"A lot of cops who don't know how to handle this say, 'Your computer has an on-off button, don't it?'" says Hale Guyer, president of Professionals Against Confidence Crimes and a senior instructor for the High Tech Crime Institute. "Of the entire population of law enforcement -- some 800,000 people -- maybe 10 percent are trained to deal with these crimes. Only 5 percent have the funds to have a computer forensically examined. And because all the cyberstalking laws are so new and there is so little case law history, only a few of those cops are going to have a prosecutor who knows what to do. That leaves about 2 percent of the cops. A lot of victims don't even report cyberstalking because they're not sure law enforcement will accept the complaint."

It's not just cyberstalking that women don't report -- they often don't report other incidents of stalking, even after they obtain protective orders. Taxie Sierra's estranged husband continued to make threatening phone calls after she obtained her protective order, but she never called the police. "I was afraid of making him even madder," she says.

Like her, many women with protective orders walk this perilous line, wanting their stalker to keep his distance but terrified to do anything more to set him off. "People are afraid of police intervention," says Mark Wynn. "They know that making a police report can be dangerous. They figure if bad things happen to the offender, bad things might happen to them."

Not only fear keeps women from reporting violations of their protective order -- or, like the majority of stalking or domestic violence victims, from getting one in the first place. Victims typically have a web of ties to their stalkers, including children, relatives, friends, finances and homes owned in common. It's hard to limit contact with a former or estranged husband when you still want him to have a relationship with his children; and many of the victims still have feelings for their stalkers, despite everything. When the stalker isn't threatening, he's usually calling to plead and cajole and insist that things will be different this time if she'll only let him come home. So often, instead of calling the police, the victim decides to take her stalker's call -- even if experts say that's the worst thing they can do, because it implies that they didn't really mean it when they obtained their protective order.

"There's history in these cases, there are lingering emotions, there are kids, so the victims give them that chance," says Tim Johnson, a Boulder, Colo., County district attorney who is preparing to prosecute a man for 17 years of stalking. "To someone who's obsessed and is stalking, even an angry response gives them the satisfaction of still being able to control this person."

Even though victim's rights advocates argue that the whole point of protective orders is to limit the abuser's behavior, not the victim's, the police often react harshly to women who waffle about their protective orders and sometimes arrest both parties if there's a violation. This happened to Ohioan Betty Lucas, who invited her ex-husband to their child's birthday party. After there was a fight, the cops arrested both Lucas and her ex, and both were convicted of domestic violence and complicity to violate a protective order. In what victim's rights advocates hail as a victory, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 24 that only the target of a protective order can be charged with violating it, not the person who took out the order.

While the vast majority of stalkers don't end up murdering their victims, as Taxie Sierra's husband did, their behavior still takes a terrible toll. Stalkers know all the details of their victim's lives -- where they work and what route they take to get there, where their friends live, where they take yoga classes or go for their favorite dish of beef lo mein. They use these details to flash themselves, like vengeful wraiths, in and out of their victims' lives. They make threats in person, over the phone, by mail, e-mail, and fax, and through third parties. And the women are reminded of these threats every time there's another sighting. Thus, the stalkers try to control their victims -- and force them into a careful, tightly circumscribed lifestyle.

"You see substantial emotional stress with these women," says Wynn, "They're constantly looking over their shoulders, and that's just what the stalker wants. They feel like, 'When is the next shoe going to drop?'"

Although Wynn says the life span of most domestic violence stalking cases is 18 months, some women have to endure this kind of terrorism for years. Take the case of Sherry Meinberg, a California educator and the author of "The Bogeyman: Stalking and Its Aftermath," who was stalked and harassed by her ex-husband for more than 40 years. She advises women not only to get a protective order and report any violations, but also to take it upon themselves to make sure police enforce the order. "I tell people to carry a copy of their protective order in their purse, plus a copy of the stalking law and all related laws," she says. "And tell everybody -- they need to know your problem. You need to have flyers out with a picture of the person. I have teenagers around my neighborhood who passed a flyer out to 400 houses."

Meinberg's stalker was finally nailed after a day of driving past her house dozens of times, shortly after he wrote her a spate of letters promising that she was "in for an experience you've never had before and would never have again." Meinberg called the police, who came but were reluctant to interfere with a "family matter" even though she had been married to another man for 34 years. When the police finally pulled her ex-husband over and looked in his car, they found a gun and lots of ammunition in the back seat. He was sentenced to four years for stalking with a gun. He has now been out of prison for a year. Meinberg hasn't seen him yet, but she's received a lot of phone calls in which someone breathes but does not speak on the other end.

"I've spent years looking over my shoulder," Meinberg says during a telephone interview, then pauses to regain her composure. "I'm still so emotional talking about it."

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