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Intimate Partner Stalking among College Students: Examining Situational Contexts Related to Police Notification

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Abstract

A nontrivial percentage of men and women report being stalked in their lifetime, and many of these experiences were perpetrated by a current or former intimate partner. This study seeks to better understand the situational contexts of this social phenomenon among a high-risk population - college students - and explores how elements of the situational context of intimate partner stalking relate to police notification.Using data from college students attending 24 universities in the United States, logistic regression analyses are supplemented with conjunctive analyses of case configurations (CACC), which allow for the construction of situational contexts of intimate partner stalking and a comparison of contexts that are and are not reported to the police.Overall, police notification for intimate partner stalking is low (6%). Logistic regression analyses revealed that multiple types of stalking victimization and interference with activities are related to an increased likelihood of police notification. CACC indicated that the relevance of interference with activities is dependent upon self-reporting that the victimization resulted in an intimidating environment. Furthermore, multiple types of stalking victimizations and co-occurring victimizations (i.e., physical violence, sexual violence, and coercive control) are related to police notification if the victim also reports interference with activities and an intimidating environment. These relationships are driven by White, non-Hispanic women who live off-campus.Our dual analytical approach highlights the complementary use of traditional regression methods and CACC. These results provide insight for efforts to assist victims of intimate partner stalking in order to encourage police notification.

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Notes

  1. While stalking often has an absence of physical harm, it is not always the case. Stalking is related to other forms of interpersonal violence including incidents involving physical or sexual violence.

  2. McBEE data were collected by a University of Kentucky based team and funds were provided by Bystander Program Adoption & Efficacy to Reduce SV-IPV in College Community. Funding source: Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Cooperative Agreement U01 CE002668. (Multi College Bystander Efficacy Evaluation). The team included Principal Investigators Ann L. Coker, PhD, MPH and Heather M. Bush, PhD., as well as Candace J. Brancato, Emily R. Clear, and Kelsey Rutherford.

  3. We only include information from incidents that occurred within the previous academic year in order to capture experiences of students while enrolled at the college or university.

  4. Unfortunately, the data preclude the ability to distinguish between current and former intimate partners who engaged in stalking behaviors because current or former intimate partners were collapsed into one response category for some of the stalking measures. Not only is this a common response category for victimization surveys (e.g., NCVS) but it also accounts for the fact that some of the behaviors may have occurred while the respondent was in a relationship with the partner and some may have occurred while the two were no longer in a relationship. Additionally, we were unable to account for victimizations by multiple partner since questions regarding the relationship with the perpetrator were only in reference to the most recent event.

  5. We are unable to account for the duration of the IP stalking behaviors due to data limitations (not available in the data).

  6. While a more behaviorally specific measured would have been preferred to a simple question about the use of physical force, we are limited by the measures offered in the data.

  7. Individual items for all measures and psychometric properties, when relevant, are available in the appendix.

  8. Additional analyses considered victims’ year in school and victims’ membership in a fraternity/sorority. Neither year in school nor fraternity/sorority were significantly associated with reporting in the regression model. In the CACC matrix, no dominant contexts involved members of a fraternity or sorority. In the CACC analyses, year in school was contextual in nature, indicating that students of any year in school would only notify the police when the situational context also included an intimidating environment and interference with activities. Given these results, we opted to remove these elements of the situational context from the presented analyses as they do not provide more insight into police notification than the results presented. Other variables that are of interest to police notification (e.g., SES and duration of stalking) were not available in the data.

  9. Given the relationship between victim services and police notification, we investigated whether the forms of coping by “moving outward”, including seeking assistance from other third-parties including campus victim advocates or another form of victim service, were relevant to police notification. Unfortunately, too few victims of IP stalking engaged in this form of coping, precluding it from our analyses.

  10. 3072 possible contexts = 3 [gender identity] * 4 [race/ethnicity] * 2 [lived off campus] * 2 [co-occurring sexual assault] *2 [co-occurring physical violence] * 2 [coercive control] * 2 [threats] * 2 [number of stalking behaviors] * 2 [intimidating environment] * 2 [interfered/limited].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. Cesar Chavez Blvd., San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Megan Bears Augustyn

  2. The University of Colorado Denver, 201 Larimer St, Denver, Colorado, USA

    Callie Marie Rennison

  3. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S Maryland Pkwy, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

    Gillian M. Pinchevsky

  4. Florida State University, 600 W College Ave, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Amy B. Magnuson

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Augustyn, M.B., Rennison, C.M., Pinchevsky, G.M. et al. Intimate Partner Stalking among College Students: Examining Situational Contexts Related to Police Notification. J Fam Viol 35, 679–691 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-019-00115-6

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