It’s National Stalking Awareness Week 2024. The personal safety charity the Suzy Lamplugh Trust is making policy recommendations, including calling on the Government to publish a national Tackling Stalking Plan, to complement the Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy published in 2021 and the Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan of 2022.
The Trust is asking for funding for specialist stalking support services to be able to meet the needs of victims and the increasing demands posed by referrals from the police, CPS and healthcare. All relevant individuals that deal with stalking cases must undertake independent specialist stalking training, including those across the police, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), and health and social care, the Trust asks; and it wants the creation of national data standards to ensure the consistency and comparability of data across all criminal justice agencies to enable agencies to track the journey of victims through the criminal justice system from report to conviction.
Emma Lingley-Clark, Interim CEO of Suzy Lamplugh Trust, says: “At the Suzy Lamplugh Trust we strive to hold agencies supporting victims of stalking to account to ensure they are working effectively to achieve the best possible outcome for victims. But without published data that allows us to track their journey through the criminal justice system there is no accountability. This year marks another year of shockingly low conviction rates for stalking cases, and ongoing failures by the criminal justice system when keeping victims informed.
“Victims of stalking have waited far too long for change. We urgently need agencies to work together to tackle the long-term systemic issues that the National Stalking Consortium, as well as HMICFRS [police inspectorate], have reported. Joining forces against stalking means collectively improving criminal justice outcomes and ensuring the victim remains informed and supported at every stage of the process.”
The Trust noted that in 2022 more than half of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) made a commitment to increase reports of stalking in their jurisdiction, yet 67pc, two-thirds of the forces that responded to the Trust’s 2024 Freedom of Information (FoI) request and had also committed to increasing the number of reports actually recorded a decrease in the number of reports in their force between year ending March 2022 and year ending March 2023. Only five of those that made the commitment recorded an increase in the number of reported stalking cases. The Trust said that it’s vital that stalking is given the prioritisation that it deserves.
The Trust said that it was shocked by what it termed extremely low numbers of applications for Stalking Protection Orders. Twelve police forces that responded to the Trust’s FOI request applied for ten or fewer SPOs (full and interim combined) in the year ending March 2023. As for delays to such orders and police ignorance of them, one victim of stalking told the Trust that ‘I don’t have the energy to fight the police and the stalker at the same time’.
