More than a million women and 900,000 men are stalked every year, but that does not include 'cyber-stalking or online harassment.' The police and CPS are concerned that there is a wide spread problem of cyber-stalking which the Police define as "unwanted communication that causes fear, alarm or distress and can be sent by email, social networking sites or text messages."
New guidelines on dealing with ‘E-stalking’ will be published by the Crown Prosecution Service later, aimed at people who use the internet to target others. Alongside the legislation will be a research project to uncover the extent of the problem.
But leading psychologist Dr Emma Short from the University of Bedfordshire warns that many people 'harass by accident' because they don’t know how to behave online, thus more guidelines have to be introduced so that people are clear what constitutes as inappropriate online behaviour.
She continues: “We are very careful about how we behave off-line, we keep safe and we avoid the dangerous parts of town. But online people are much less certain of who is watching them, who can see what they are putting out there and how vulnerable that might make them.”
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Source: Skynewstech