The first I knew something was wrong was a 6.37pm email from a colleague: “Just got this weird tweet.”
The tweet was about me. Posted by an account I didn’t recognise and tagging my colleague, it was an attempt to shame me with some personal yet strange details about my life when I had been a uni student.
Baby Reindeer recounts the tale of a chance meeting that quickly escalates into stalking.
Haha, I wrote back, embarrassed. “Looks like I have a stalker.”
You will have likely heard about Netflix’s hit new TV series Baby Reindeer, a somewhat true story about the stalking of Donny, an upcoming comedian, that starts off with unwanted emails and Facebook comments, then escalates. The viewer is left asking why, as Donny makes one bad decision after the next, he isn’t decisive in cutting his stalker out of his life. Why he doesn’t confront them with their behaviour. Why he doesn’t go to the authorities sooner.
What is particularly compelling about Baby Reindeer is how it captures the confused situation that comes with being a victim of stalking, or harassment. The mixture of fear, pity and shame. A situation that too many of us are experiencing on social media.
The fear that springs from such hostility is obvious. It’s deeply unnerving to know that someone out there wants to hurt you, and it sets your mind racing. What do they want? Where might they next appear? How far might they take it? They clearly knew where I worked, so it was easy to slip into feelings of paranoia as I stepped outside into the dark at the end of the day.
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That feeling wasn’t helped when I looked at the account, let’s call it JohnD, and found that pretty much everything it had posted was about me. In the following days, JohnD continued tagging my colleagues with tweets in an attempt to shame me, before tweeting me directly, alerting me to the messages they had “sent to your followers”.
Harassment is all too common and something we should all be more open about. Twenty per cent of women and almost 7 per cent of men have experienced stalking, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And just as Baby Reindeer showed Donny crumbling under a barrage of electronic criticisms, it’s worth noting that stalking doesn’t only involve someone lurking outside your house. It often involves digital tracking or threats about the release of personal information on social media. Nor is stalking only, or even primarily, about intimate partners. When women are stalked by men, a quarter of the time it’s someone they don’t know. When it is someone they know, 70 per cent are not a current or previous partner, ABS data shows.
