How the Privatisation of Survival Punishes Stalking Victims

When you are being stalked, your world shrinks. What starts as a few unwanted contacts, messages, or seemingly accidental encounters quickly spirals into a campaign of psychological control, a form of gaslighting you cannot always explain, even to yourself. You find yourself constantly checking behind you, your awareness sharpened to a point that becomes exhausting, especially when people step into your personal space, when you’re checking locks twice, and reworking your daily routine just to stay safe. Yes, you are now in the routine of modifying your behaviour, because somebody can’t control theirs or they have gone unchecked for a lengthy period of time and moved into the state of privilege, which means freedom, something the target does not have.

But the emotional toll is only part of the experience (not a story). There is a hidden reality that few people talk about until they are living inside it: the financial cost of surviving something the system merely labels harassment, or abuse, a cost the state and the person being targeted and then hunted do not share equally.

A key point I do wish to raise is this… It costs him nothing to leave. No fee, no supervision, no record that reliably travels with him. Clare’s Law exists precisely so a new partner can ask what he’s done before, but a scheme built on disclosure is only as strong as what actually gets recorded and shared. When his history doesn’t follow him across a force boundary, the next woman he meets is asking a system that already doesn’t know who he is – he’s invisible to live a charmed life.

Right now, across the UK, we are watching a quiet collapse of the safety net meant to protect victims. Specialist charities, which have long provided dedicated support, are closing due to a lack of sustained government funding. At the same time, social housing and NHS provision are being reshaped into commissioned service models or handed to private contracts, often without the scrutiny that would apply to any other public tender. Survival, in this arrangement, is no longer something the state guarantees. It is, however, something the victim is expected to purchase. I talk more about this topic on the podcast of Action Against Stalking in July 2026.

Naming the Harm Properly Through Zemiology

There is a school of UK criminology that gives this argument a name and I love working in this field as it opens up incidents, so people understand the perpetrator dynamic. Paddy Hillyard and Steve Tombs, working within what has become known as zemiology, or the study of social harm, argue that ‘crime’ is a narrow and legally constructed category that captures only a fraction of the damage done to people’s lives. A great deal of harm, theirs included, never meets the threshold of a prosecutable offence, so it disappears from criminological attention entirely. Funding cuts to a stalking charity are not a crime. A police force closing a case due to inactivity is not a crime. But both produce real, measurable harm, and Hillyard and Tombs’ central claim is that a discipline fixated only on what the law calls crime will always miss most of what actually hurts people.

This matters here because the collapse of victim support in the UK is precisely the kind of harm that stays invisible under a crime-only framework. Nobody is arrested for underfunding a helpline. But the effect on the woman on the other end of that helpline is no less real.

The Ideal Victim and the System That Loses Interest

When victims report stalking to the authorities, the response is often disappointing. The justice system runs on an administrative model built for quick resolution, not for behaviour that unfolds slowly, in patterns, over months or years.

Proper stalking investigations require time, resource, and often digital forensic tracking, so agencies frequently take the easier route instead.

Nils Christie’s work on the “ideal victim” helps explain why. Christie argued that institutions are far more willing to recognise and act on behalf of victims who fit a familiar template: someone weak, blameless, and attacked suddenly by a clear stranger. A stalking victim rarely fits this picture. The harm is drawn out over time rather than sudden, and the abuse frequently delivered through proxies (mobbing) rather than the perpetrator’s own hand. She does not match the template the system is built to notice, and so the system, quite literally, stops looking and assumes it’s a real relationship that has gone wrong.

A sophisticated stalker understands this. When police finally get involved, or when a victim tries to set legal boundaries, the perpetrator does not panic. Instead, they retreat, stepping back before resurfacing elsewhere in the victim’s life, through intermediaries who pass on messages, shout abuse, take photographs, or drive past slowly. This is never a sign the behaviour has stopped. It is a pause calculated to remind the victim she is still being watched, while the file quietly closes for lack of activity (also known as incidents). The victim is left in a state of suspended alertness, and the system assumes the problem has resolved itself simply because the paperwork has gone quiet.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Look at where public money is spent, and a clear pattern appears. Perpetrators of stalking and domestic abuse can, in some cases, access psychological intervention relatively quickly, funded through schemes such as the Home Office’s Perpetrator Intervention Fund. Victims, meanwhile, are frequently left facing long waits for basic counselling, often with a practitioner who has no specialism in stalking-related trauma at all.

Loïc Wacquant’s work on the penal state offers a way of understanding this pattern rather than simply describing it as unfair. Wacquant argues that as welfare provision has retreated under successive decades of austerity, the state has increasingly managed social problems through risk-management and punitive apparatus, rather than through care. Applied here, this means resource flows towards the person defined as the risk to be managed, the perpetrator, rather than towards the person harmed by that risk. It is not simply that victims are neglected. It is that the entire architecture of state spending is now built around managing dangerous individuals, not supporting the people they have already damaged.

This is not confined to therapy. Specialist trauma treatment for complex post-traumatic stress or depression is rarely available through standard NHS pathways within a workable timeframe, forcing many victims to pay privately, go on two year waiting lists or go without.

Survival as Something You Must Now Buy

The financial burden does not stop at therapy. When the state fails to intervene against an escalating perpetrator, the entire cost of staying alive is pushed onto the person being hunted – it becomes a game. This is what Penny Green and Tony Ward’s work on state crime allows us to name properly. Green and Ward argue that when a state fails to act on obligations it has the resources to meet, that failure is itself a form of state deviance, not simply an unfortunate gap in provision. On this reading, a victim experiences two forms of harm: the stalking itself, and the institutional failure that follows it, both of which have identifiable causes and identifiable authors.

To secure even basic safety, many women find they cannot rely on statutory support at all. To escape a stalker, women give up jobs, apply for benefits, forfeit tenancies, remove children from school, and relocate, relocate and relocate into a cycle that is exhausting. They pay for home security, changed locks, and civil injunctions out of their own pocket, at a point when legal aid provision for this kind of case has narrowed to the point where fewer solicitors will take the work on at all because its not profitable to them. Survival becomes something to be financed privately, item by item, while the system continues to fund the study and management of the person who caused the need for it in the first place.

One Continuum, Not Four Separate Problems

Liz Kelly’s concept of the continuum of violence is useful here, because it resists treating stalking, coercive control, and institutional dismissal as separate problems requiring separate explanations. Kelly’s argument is that these sit on one continuous line, different expressions of the same underlying dynamic: control exercised over women, and a system that has historically struggled to take that control seriously unless it arrives in a form it already recognises. Read this way, the funding gap explored here is not a separate issue from the domestic abuse funding gap explored elsewhere. It is the same structure, repeating.

The Reality We Face

Stalking cannot be properly understood without accounting for this economic dimension. When specialist charities collapse under chronic underfunding, when the NHS medicalises trauma without resourcing its treatment, and when victims are left to fund their own protection, the system stops functioning as a safeguard and becomes, in Hillyard and Tombs’ terms, a source of harm in its own right.

What we are left with is a system built to fund the study and management of the person causing harm, while treating the survival of the person harmed as something she must arrange and pay for herself.

Until that balance changes, victims will continue to carry the financial burdens and emotional cost of a crime they did nothing to cause.

I will leave you with this… some of those women and children will continue to go missing and remain as missing people.