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Stalking is a significant social issue. The inconsistency as to what defines stalking has resulted in the creation of different methods to measure the crime. However, there has been minimal work done that assesses the severity of individual stalking behaviors. The aim of the present study was to assess the level of stalking behavior in terms of severity within a randomly selected sample of 924 cases from the database of the National Stalking Helpline. Item response theory analyses were used to assist in developing a scale that displays the ranking order of each stalking behavior. These analyses were also used to examine whether the stalking behavioral items created a single continuum of severity of stalking. Results indicated that 16 stalking behavioral items of the 28 items present in the National Stalking Helpline, best represented the severity of stalking. Unwanted communication behaviors such as text messages and phone calls were located at the lower end of the severity scale, whereas criminal damage and death threats were mapped on the higher end of the continuum. The findings also revealed that the 16 items categorized under 6 factors. The findings of the present study provide many implications for stalking agency professionals and criminal justice responses.

The study investigated whether different types of sexual homicide perpetrators are more or less skilled at delaying detection. A newly proposed direct/indirect typology was used alongside information about the time of arrest, the frequency of specific precautions as well as the impact of forensic strategies used by the perpetrators to examine skill at delaying detection. The results indicated that the time from the killing to the arrest, as measured in days, was longer for the direct than the indirect sexual killers. Despite the fact that the direct aggressors were better at delaying detection, overall the indirect and the direct offenders did not differ in the frequency of use of most of the precautions. However, different forensic awareness strategies were more efficacious for the direct and the indirect offenders. These results are discussed in relation to the crime scripts for the two perpetrator groups.

Establishing a model of sexual assault reflecting psychosocial and behavioral characteristics of perpetrators of sexual killing and rape is necessary for development in risk assessment and intervention. Methodological variations in defining sexual killing have amalgamated serial and non-serial offenders and perpetrators with direct and indirect associations between killing and sexual arousal. This study defined sexual killing specifying that killing should be directly linked to sexual arousal, and sampled 48 sexual killers, operationalized to include only those engaging in post-mortem sexual interference, with one or two known female victims (non-serial), from prison service national (England and Wales) databases. These sexual killers were compared with 48 non-homicide, life or indeterminately sentenced sexual aggressors on psychological and crime scene characteristics. Contrary to previous research, fatal outcomes were associated with neither stranger victims nor weapon presence; sexual killing was characterized by severity of violence less so than non-fatal assault. Sexual killers more often reported problems with emotional loneliness, empathic concern, and sexual entitlement than the sexual aggressors. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.