The Privatisation of Survival

The Price for Stalking

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 warfare, a form of gaslighting that you just cannot explain for some reason. You find yourself constantly looking over your shoulder as if you were some owl needing to see what is behind you – your awareness intensifies consistently and it can be exhausting, especially when people step into your personal space, you’re checking locks, and modifying your daily routine just to stay safe. But as if the emotional toll is not enough, there is a hidden reality that few people talk about until they are in the middle of it: the staggering financial cost of surviving this terrorism, this abuse.

Right now, across the UK, we are witnessing a quiet, devastating collapse of the safety net meant to protect victims. Specialist charities, which have long provided dedicated, compassionate support, are struggling to survive and disappearing due to a lack of government funding. At the same time, we see social housing and the NHS swallowing up public support pathways, twisting them into strategic models, or passing them over to private contracts without consultation or the required procurement methods that would normally be held for other businesses, because overall that is exactly what the once caring NHS has turned into – an economy.

When the state system behaves like a corporate business, real people pay the price. In UK criminology, researchers who study the “Social Harm” perspective point out that the state itself often causes more damage than the crime and that is even meets the threshold as a crime – there is more time wasted on constructing harm into a crime than actually looking at it properly. They argue that under our current system, safety is no longer treated as a basic human right, not to mention that this is the very law other are wanting to have dismantled – the only legal framework where a women can try and push her rape case through. Instead, survival has become a private luxury item that you are expected to finance yourself.

The Game of Tactical Withdrawal

When victims report stalking to the authorities, the response is often incredibly disappointing. The justice system is built on an administrative model of quick boxes to tick. Because proper stalking investigations take time, money, and digital tracking forensics, police and statutory agencies often take the easy route. Official findings, such as the recent national super-complaint filed by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust on behalf of and with the support of national grassroots companies, CIC’S and charities, show that police forces routinely fail to recognise stalking, frequently mishandling cases by treating them as minor, isolated incidents. It would be interesting to research all the companies, CIC’s and charities involved as a collective to see how well they do support victims and of course look at those who have been turned away.

Perpetrators are highly aware of institutional blindness. A sophisticated stalker understands how to play the system so well. When the police finally get involved, or when a victim tries to set legal boundaries, the perpetrator does not necessarily panic. Instead, they play a game of tactical withdrawal, to pop up in other areas of life. They simply choose to walk away and save themselves for another day.

This retreat is never a sign that they have stopped. It is a calculated pause whilst they think about another way of reaching out, just to let the victim know they are still here, watching. The stalker steps into the shadows of other constructing groups or individuals to join in the hunt, lowering their profile so the police lose interest and the investigation files are closed due to inactivity. For the victim, this planned silence is weaponised. You are left in a state of suspended terror, waiting for the other shoe to drop, while the system assumes the problem has gone away just because the administration paperwork is quiet. By choosing exactly when to pause and when to restart the torment, the predator stays entirely in control while staying safely out of the way, conducting business as usual under the guise of others who pass messages on, take photos, shout things and drive by slowly – it an be never ending and all unrecognised by naive police officers or support workers.

The Gender Divide in State Funding

If you look at where the state actually chooses to spend public money, a heartbreaking double standard appears. There is a massive gender divide in who gets financial support, and it heavily favours male perpetrators over female victims. An example would be that perpetrators who stalk can have access to psychology services, where a female victim has to go on a list of up to an 18 month wait for basic counselling with someone who may well not have the specialism in what has affected them most. Often this service can be reduced to a phone call, which is if she is believed and is actually granted access to a referral in the first place. It is a minefield for a victim.

We can see this clearly in recent UK policy decisions. The Home Office launched the Domestic Abuse and Stalking Perpetrator Intervention Fund, pouring millions of pounds of statutory grant funding directly into community programmes designed to collaborate with abusers – but what happened to that money?

We know the state willingly funds psychiatric evaluations, therapeutic interventions, and rehabilitative diversion schemes for in the main male perpetrators. The system spends thousands of public pounds trying to understand, treat, and manage the abuser’s mind under the banner of risk management.

So why haven’t they learnt anything? Where are the lessons to be learned?

In the same thought, what happens to the female victim left in the wake of that destruction? She is routinely excluded from state-funded recovery. If you need specialist trauma therapy to process complex post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, or depression, you will rarely find it on a standard NHS waiting list. Instead, you are forced to go private and pay out of your own pocket approximately £350 for a few sessions and that depends on your postcode. Sometimes women just give in, and death seems the only way out.

The Cost of Staying Alive

The financial burden does not stop at therapy. When the state and its institutions fail to stop an escalating or historic predator, the entire cost of staying alive is pushed onto the victim. This is what criminologists mean when they talk about the privatisation of survival and the harm inflicted from the state – you receive two forms of violence.

To achieve basic safety, she cannot rely on anyone but herself, female victims are regularly forced into total economic ruin, and nobody seems to care. To escape a stalker, women have to abandon their jobs, try and claim benefits, forfeit their tenancies or mortgages, uproot their children from schools, and move to entirely new towns. They have to spend their own money installing home security cameras, upgrading locks, paying for private/civil legal injunctions, and changing their entire lives. Because let’s face it, legal aid is simply not something solicitors make money on any longer, so they don’t care or chase like they used to. They simply pass the buck and the case ends up over county lines and in all that time, she is still being pursued, and nobody cares.

The current system ensures that the rehabilitation of male behaviour is treated as a public priority, while expecting women to finance their own survival and recovery. It is a setup that actively punishes the victim for being targeted, treating her safety as a private luxury expense. It is as simple as that.

The Reality We Face

We cannot understand stalking without looking at this economic unfairness. When specialist charities fail due to funding starvation due to giving services so freely and not forward planning, when the NHS medicalises the trauma, and when the state forces victims to pay for their own protection, the system becomes a part of the problem.

The reality is that we are looking at a system that would rather fund the mind of the predator than the survival of the person being hunted. Until those changes, victims are left to carry the financial and emotional weight of a crime they did nothing to cause. They continue to go missing.

They continue to be missing people.