Republished.
Ever feel you’re being watched?
Ever feel you’re being watched?
Most Americans don’t pay much attention to their surroundings as they
go about their daily business, but that’s not an option for the more
than 3.4 million who become stalking victims each year.
Thirty-three percent of those stalking victims are Native American,
more than any other race or ethnicity, according to a U.S. Department of
Justice 2009 report, “Stalking Victimization in the United States.”
The sample size of Native Americans might have skewed that
percentage, Shannon Catalano, a statistician with the DoJ said. “But in
victimization that is something we see, a higher crime rate across the
board against Native Americans.”
American Indian women suffer the highest rates of domestic violence,
stalking and sexual assault of any population, reports another study by the Tribal Law and Policy Institute and the Southwest Center for Law and Policy. The majority of perpetrators of these crimes are non-Indian males.
“Stalkers are usually older, more intelligent, have higher levels of
education and status, and are the most violent of all criminals,” says
Ann Dapice, Ph.D., a Lenape/Cherokee and director of Education and
Research at T.K. Wolf, Inc., an American Indian stalking authority.
Tamela Dawson dated, and left, the wrong man. “It started with psychological warfare,” Dawson, of Cherokee descent, says.
She came home to find that her furniture had been rearranged, and the
crotches torn from her underwear. She figured her house was bugged when
she told a friend she needed a soup ladle and one appeared soon after
in her dishwasher. She suffered sleep deprivation when a noise campaign
ensued.
“It started gradually, then escalated. Phone calls. Anything in my
house that had an alarm feature they’d set at five minutes after the
hour several times through the night, which would trigger my startle
reflex multiple times,” says Dawson. “Wherever I went, up to 10 times a
day, cars would either go by my home or follow me with a very distinct
and recognizable pattern of honks,” says Dawson.
“They played songs over and over and wherever I went, I heard those
songs. Sting’s ‘I’ll be watching you,’ and Stevie Wonders’ ‘Mon
Cherie.’ Cars would park outside of my house in the middle of the night,
or would do drive bys, with the songs blaring out their rolled-down
windows.”
Her perpetrators worked her in stages. “With sophisticated
psychological manipulation, a woman loses her problem solving ability,”
Dawson says. “You’re operating at maybe 20 percent. You share the crazy
things happening to you with your support structure, and that separates
you from them. Once they’ve isolated you, they break you.”
Dawson says someone drugged the food in her home and later returned to rape her.
“I remember on several occasions coming out of whatever drugged state
I was in to seeing multiple men in my room, and another time finding a
man on top of me. I remember fighting to stay conscious and I couldn’t.”
Her physical therapist saw bruises and asked if she was abused.
Shocked, Dawson said no.
It wasn’t denial. “You’re so busy trying to stay one step ahead of
the stalking, harassment, and noise, for me, there were no words. You
just do not think.” Date rape drugs like Rohypnol, GHB, and Ketamine can cause memory problems and confusion even when used just once on a victim.
Her therapist’s suspicion prompted Dawson to contact police and hire a bodyguard.
“Get out of Santa Rosa,” police told her. “We cannot protect you. Go
home to your family.” She moved home to Arkansas after her bodyguard
turned to her, furious, asking what she’d done, if she’d testified
against any one – because, he said, gang members were stalking her
house. Dawson now believes her ex-boyfriend set her up for sexual
trafficking.
Stalking is not a single, identifiable act but a series of actions
meant to cause fear in the target. Some states define it to include
lying-in-wait, surveillance, nonconsensual communication, telephone
harassment or vandalism. It takes the form of theft, kidnapping and
arson, killing pets, breaking and entering, and gaslighting—when
perpetrators steal or hide insignificant items or make changes in a
victim’s home to make them think they’re going crazy.
Dapice says stalkers use mind games to make victims ‘feel crazy,’ and
successfully obtain help from others, called proxy stalkers. “Stalkers
excel in planning, scheming and subtlety,” Dapice says. “They display
obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and become addicted to their own brain
chemicals. The longer they stalk the more obsessive they become, until
they kill.”
Stalkers use technology like satellite global position systems (GPS),
computers, and hidden cameras to track the daily activities of one in
four victims. “Roving bug” programs installed into a cell phone can
listen through its microphone, even when the phone is off.
The DoJ stalking study measured unwanted calls, texts, e-mails, notes
or gifts, cyber-stalking, and posting information or spreading
falsehoods about the victim on the Internet, in a public place, or by
word of mouth. Dapice says stalkers also use electronic technology such
as tracking devices, identity theft, mail theft, bank account theft, and
wiretapping to expand their power.
Dawson’s stalkers dressed uniformly, like wearing red t-shirts and
standing on every corner on her drive to work, or in the aisles at the
grocery store, smirking. “A red t-shirt is not enough evidence to bring
to someone’s attention, so only the victim knows,” she says.
Victims often report such bizarre behaviors they have trouble
convincing others that it is happening—including the professional
assigned to help them. “Stalkers are very smart, and the police don’t
believe victims,” says Dapice. “Or they don’t like looking for clues,
and putting the evidence together.”
T.K. Wolf’s board member Sheree Hukill Hukill listened to a woman who
said she’d reported to the police that ‘God’ was talking to her each
night when she went to bed. “As you can imagine, local law enforcement
did not take her seriously. Eventually, one officer found the stalker
had rigged an elaborate sound system under the woman’s house with
speakers in her bedroom. Her stalker was the voice of ‘God’ telling her
these very bizarre things.”
“Denial of the serious nature of this criminal behavior — and the
high risk of violence — is still endemic among mental health and law
enforcement professionals,” forensic psychologist Reid Meloy Ph.D., a
clinical professor of psychology at the University of California, San
Diego says. “Only two percent of victims claim they are being stalked
when in fact they are not.”
Dapice had a case where police told the victim if she called to
report further evidence, they would lock her up. She’s even seen a case
where rogue law enforcement officials cooperated with the stalkers.
T.K. Wolf interviewed law enforcement across the country and found a
pattern of passing the buck, from police to district attorneys to judges
to U.S. postal inspectors to FBI agents. In turn, Dapice says that
social service providers, mental health experts, governmental agencies
and private attorneys are unable or unwilling to provide services to
victims.
Meanwhile, the physical and mental toll of stalking is staggering.
“Cortisol, meant for fight or flight in temporary danger continues
acting, and continuous cortisol results in destruction of brain and body
cells and organs,” says Dapice. “We know that post traumatic stress
disorder induces cell loss in the brain and is related to depression.
Worse is what I have named CATS – continuous, acute, traumatic syndrome,
where the trauma continues over years and the victim remains in an
acute trauma situation.”
The Tides Foundation funded a video documentary of stalking victims.
Almost all have a cortisol “pudgy face” appearance, says Dapice. “Many
victims gain weight in the abdomen; it’s nature’s once adaptive way of
preparing the body for hard times ahead via a message from the stressor
that caused the cortisol release originally. With weight gain comes
cardiovascular problems.”
Agencies and the law often categorize stalking as domestic violence,
limiting services to ‘known intimates.’ Yet this group represents only
30.3 percent of victims. ‘Known others,’ like co-workers, relatives,
classmates, and neighbors account for 45.1 percent. A surprising one in
four does not know their stalkers. Some is organized stalking, or
“mobbing.” Others hide behind hired individuals who do their harassment
for them.
“There are people who stalk relationships, people who stalk in order
to do revenge, people who stalk political and entertainment figures,”
says Dapice. “There is group and proxy stalking. There are different
motives but whatever it is, it is always a power play.”
Stalkers will follow their victims from one jurisdiction to another –
making it difficult for authorities to investigate and prosecute their
crimes. “Often moving makes no difference,” says Dapice. “Stalkers will
walk around a neighborhood and tell lies and stories about their
victims.”
Dawson thought moving home to Arkansas would provide safety. She
learned the campaign to discredit her had followed her when an elderly
man, passing her on the street said, ‘You are disgusting.’ At her
new job, “One day everyone loved me and I was doing a stellar job. The
next day nobody would talk to me. People glared and stared at me, good
people.”
“I was so traumatized I didn’t know where to start.”
Dawson’s gas-lighting incidents, slander, the following, and a noise
campaign continue. Her story is remarkably similar to that of Vicki
Burnett, a Minnesota Chippewa who lives in Nevada, and Elisabeth
Buchanan and Diane Dillon, both Metis women living in British Columbia,
Canada, who also report having had sonic devices used to ward off
animals trained on them from a distance, and radar devices that measure a
car or baseball’s speed that cause great discomfort when aimed at
humans.
Like Dawson, Burnett’s terror began as stalking. Then came fuzzily
waking to men in her room. Suspecting rape, but not knowing which nights
the assaults took place, Burnett’s doctor offered to test her hair for
drugs. “But they charged $500, and my medical insurance said it wasn’t
medically necessary.”
After waking to unaccounted pinpoint bruises on her forearms and
legs, and her stalker’s uncanny ability to track her, Burnett suspects
her stalkers injected a radio-frequency identification microchip. She
woke once to IV apparatus and tubing in her bedroom and called the
police, “but all they could do was take a report, because nothing was
taken from my house, and there was no physical assault.
Kits that let you inject a grain of rice sized tracking chip into pets with a hypodermic then track them with a handheld radio-wave scanner
sell on popular sites such as Amazon. Today’s scanners can locate a
chip as far as 30 to 60 feet away, and interface with computers. Chips
can also hide in a woman’s purse, but if found would serve as hard
evidence.
Burnett wants an MRI to prove her suspicions but faces physicians
leery of ordering a scan without medical justification, or worse,
ordering her to a psychiatrist.
Human rights advocate Debbie Newhook lives in the picturesque harbor
community of Nanaimo on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. She knows
seven stalking victims in her community. Two are Native, and one has MRI
and CAT scans that prove she has implants.
“Her doctor will not remove them until she has legal counsel, but no
one will take her case,” Newhook says. “All doors seem to be slammed
shut even when medical imaging proves that there is some kind of foreign
object in their bodies.”
Most of the violence in Indian country has been non-Natives against
Natives, and not because stalking victims are on tribal lands, Dapice
says. “No one, Indian or non-Indian who is stalked gets any help.”
Worse, some people blame the victims so they are afraid to come out of
the closet.
Men make up 27 percent of stalking victims, and are often doubly
victimized “because police will say ‘what’s wrong with you, why can’t
you protect yourself?’” Dapice said the police blame the judges, and the
judges blame the system. “Everyone blames everyone else and eventually
it’s somebody else’s fault, and nothing gets done.”
Dawson’s goal is to expose her stalking and sexual trafficking story.
“If we can engage women’s groups, we’ll have success in fighting it.”
“People who go along with this kind of extra judicial punishment
because they believe the lies and slander about the victim should be
ashamed of themselves for participating in this harassment,” Newhook
says. “The people who are misusing energy devices against their
neighbors should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Communities that understand stalking and support its victims help to
combat the crime. The only thing that’s going to stop it, says Dapice,
“is peer pressure.” Don’t accept lies or rumors that generate hate about
the victim.
“If we are to stop stalking, we must believe the victims and the
statistics and then take action on multiple fronts,” says Dapice. “We
must educate each other on the causes and effects of stalking, and bring
all players to the table: victims, social service agencies, law
enforcement, attorneys, judiciary, mental health professionals, medical
professionals, employers, governmental agencies, scientific researchers,
media and the faith communities. All must work together and be held
accountable.”
If a friend, neighbor, coworker, or family member thinks they’re
being stalked, encourage them to take it seriously and get help. If you
or someone you know is a victim, visit the National Stalking Awareness Month, National Center for Victims of Crime or the DoJ’s Office on Violence Against Women for information and links to state and regional resources. Or contact your local women’s crisis center.
Other Resources:
My Mobile Witness:
You get the feeling something is not quite right. Now, you can use your
cell phone to take a picture of the person or situation that is making
you uncomfortable, and send it with a note to secure vault. Your message
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your suspicion turns out to be true. And the service is free. Sign up at
My Mobile Witness.
by Terri Hansen
[Bolding and italics are Blog poster's emphasis]
Original article: Exposing The Invisible: Stalking In Indian Country
