A call went out on the neighborhood Whatsapp this evening that a stalker was on some lady's front lawn bothering her, so a bunch of people went to sit out on their porches with baseball bats until the cops came and shoo'd him away. (Which was probably the best outcome for the stalker).
Do y'all have any good advice to deal with stalkers? It's a constant problem, and the state's response is more or less to just let it go until someone get's seriously injured or killed. I'm curious what anarchists and community defense groups and stuff have come up with to deal with these creeps.
In chapter 5 of Another Politics: Talking across Today's Transformative Movements they describe one organization that had success publicly calling them out:
SLG was what SIIS developed to deal with these twin problems of police violence and gendered interpersonal violence. SLG sought to create, in the words of SIIS, "a space where violence against sistas is not tolerated, and where women turn to each other instead of the police to address the violence in their lives." Organizers used posters, T-shirts, stickers, and murals to physically create this territory, and they deepened it through workshops aimed at young women in their neighborhood. SIIS also developed what they called "Sista Circles," small groups of young women collectively supporting one another and, when necessary, intervening in circumstances of harassment or violence. For instance, Rojas-Urrutia said, "When somebody is getting stalked, the whole group would go to the [stalker’s] workplace and embarrass him in front of the boss and call attention and make some direct demands of what he needed to do. And it would work actually—more than calling the cops—and [it would] heighten the profile publicly of this question of violence in the neighborhood. . . . And we would bring in the fathers too; it wasn’t just all women but other people in the neighborhood too."
I mean, the cops shoo stalkers away by threat of violence. Go away or we'll physically throw you in a cage. Without the police, and if talking to them doesn't work, "Hey dude, this person doesn't want you following them around, we're gonna need you to go live your life somewhere else" then you gotta leverage the threat of violence. "Go away please" will have to become "go away or we'll beat you up / physically move you somewhere else"
I really don't see any way around that.
Edit: To add on to this, ideally we'd be addressing the root cause of this kind of behavior in the long term. I honestly have no idea what exactly causes someone to become a stalker, but whatever that is needs to be solved. And then we wouldn't have to be threatening anyone.
Pure bullshittery, but I image that stalking behavior is enabled by relative social anonimity, aka know one knows who their neighbors are, and lack of consequences. If some dude can sneak in to an apartment building because no one knows that he's a stalker who isn't supposed to be there, and if no-one will intervene in disputes then it's easier to do stalker shit. If a person is alone in a community and can't call on a bunch of friends to show up and break a stalker's legs it's a lot easier for stalkers to do stalker shit.
And the legal system doesn't provide any protection from stalkers. They won't arrest people for stalking, and if you get your friends to proactively go out and beat the shit out of the stalker they're the ones who would get arrested. The state protects the assailant right up until they actually murder a woman.
And that goes back to a lot of other shit. Like the old idea that rape is committed by stangers, which I think we all know is bullshit. The state and society's refusal to treat domestic violence as a problem or guarantee women medical, housing, and food security. Like the most straightforward way to end domestic violence is to ensure that women can leave their abusers and not lose housing, food, medicine, and their kids.
And the legal system doesn’t provide any protection from stalkers. They won’t arrest people for stalking, and if you get your friends to proactively go out and beat the shit out of the stalker they’re the ones who would get arrested. The state protects the assailant right up until they actually murder a woman.
That's a good point. Dealing with this kind of problem in a system which actively protects the person doing the stalking (or whatever other bad activity) is a completely distinct challenge compared to dealing with the same problem in a system lacking cops altogether. And I think @gcc's comment is a good example of the sort of approach we'd have to take within our system until we can build a better system.
You did the best thing. Your neighborhood all knows who this guy is and showed that you can absolutely whoop his ass.