Question 2: The Evolution of Stalking
Introduction
Duntley and Buss (2012) concede that there is an acrimonious debate regarding how stalking should be defined (Duntley & Buss, 2012). To them, stalking and other phenomena related to stalking should be defined using terms such as obsessive relational intrusion, unwanted pursuit behaviors, courtship persistence, and criminal stalking. To others, stalking is an obsessive or unwanted attention by one person or a group of people to another person or a group of people. To this category of scholars, stalking is intimidating and harassing and may include the stalker closely monitoring and following the victim wherever they go and in whatever they do. It will be argued in this paper that the term stalking…show more content… They aver that stalking relationships have been advanced evolutionally to help in solving mating problems. According to them, stalkers engage themselves in stalking with many motives. First, stalkers may stalk their victim to guard an existing relationship. Secondly, the stalker may seek to acquire a new mate through stalking their movements. Thirdly, they may do so with an intention of fending poachers off an existing relationship. Moreover, stalkers may also intend to poach into someone else’s mate and also guard their kin from sexual exploitation. Lastly the authors write that the stalker may be carrying out a predatory and sexual exploitation act against the victim. The authors, however, aver that human beings have evolved the adaptations that were historically meant to deal with the central theme of stalking, i.e. mating, and that the same humans have also evolved the anti-stalking adaptations mean to minimize the effects of stalking. Brune (2001) writes that the evolutionary adaptations of stalking were meant to counter erotomania, explained earlier as the false feeling that the victim in secretly in love with the stalker (Brune, 2001). To him, stalking evolved as a result of the stalker’s inner feeling that the victim was in love with the stalker and that if they kept following them and monitoring their movements they would eventually establish a…show more content… Thus, the stalker keeps monitoring the movements of the victim with the hope that they will get back to them reestablish the relationship that had already broken up. However, Perilloux and Buss aver that not all break-ups lead to stalking behaviors (Perilloux & Buss, 2008). It is possible for former lovers to forget about each other completely, especially where both were on the wrong side of the break-up. Is has been hypothesized that men are more likely to develop stalking features than women because they are the ones who are more likely to come up with strategies to rejuvenate lost love with their former spouses. Thus, men have been held to be greater stalkers than women (Abrams & Robinson, 2008). It has also been hypothesized that women can become stalkers in an attempt to select socially dominant and physically formidable mates. The evolutionary explanation of this theory is that women like physically formidable and socially endowed mates to defend them in times of danger. Further, scholars have hypothesized that the evolutionary nature of stalking has been facilitated by attempts to conceal important information. Those who conceal the information are likely to fall victim to stalking because of the stalker’s desire to acquire the vital concealed information (Brown,