What were stalkers called before they were called "stalkers"?
A stalker is commonly referred to as:
- a person who harasses another person, as a former lover, a famous person, etc., in an aggressive, often threatening and illegal manner: Hollywood stars often have security guards to keep dangerous stalkers at bay. (dictionary.reference.com)
Stalker with the above connotation is a relatively recent term:
- Meaning "harass obsessively" first recorded 1991, probably from "pursue stealthily," Old English -stealcian, as in bestealcian "to steal along, walk warily," (etymonline)
The fact that the term usage is quite recent may be the consequence of a considerable increase of illegal harassment in the last couple of decades. I can imagine that stalkers, unluckily, were around well before 1991.
Questions:
What was the common term used to refer to them or to their 'activity' before the term came into use presumably replacing previous definitions?
Were the terms stalker/stalking coined in a legal context (see the passing of anti-stalking laws below) or is there evidence that they were used in everyday language first?
Edit:
As shown by @kristina Lopez California was the first State to pass anti-stalking laws:
California's stalking laws are most commonly associated with celebrity cases. In fact, celebrity stalking is what prompted the California Legislature to enact anti-stalking laws back in 1990.
The first was the repeated stabbing of actress Theresa Saldana. The second was the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. In both cases, the defendants were obsessed fans who stalked the actresses. As a result of these cases,5 California enacted Penal Code 646.9 in 1990.6
I've stumbled across an example of the modern usage of stalking that's a couple of decades earlier than most of those citations above. It comes from John Le Carre's 1968 novel A Small Town In Germany. A woman is describing her colleague's behaviour after she rejected his advances: he starts turning up at all the parties she goes to, and so she suspects that he has been reading her mail in her office pigeonhole in order to anticipate her movements. She confronts him about his behaviour, and relates his response:
'He assured me categorically that he was not… stalking me. That was the expression I used; it was one I instantly regretted. I cannot imagine how I came on such a ridiculous metaphor.'
What's particularly interesting, I think, is that the character appears to be inventing the modern usage within the story, but then trying to withdraw from it. (Of course, this being Le Carré, the man isn't a stalker at all, he's a suspected mole.)
There may not have been a specific, well-understood noun to describe the stalker prior to the word "stalker" taking on a specific meaning under the law. "intimidator", "harasser", "nuisance" or in specific cases,"Peeping Tom" may have been used to describe that person.
Per the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault website, anti-stalking laws first were enacted in 1990 in California with all 50 states having a similar law in place within the following few years. The historical information below describes stalkers prior to the stalking laws in very general terms - usually a former spouse or someone known to the victim:
Until the passage of stalking (also known as "anti-stalking") legislation, victims had few remedies. Many citizens were victimized by incessant intimidation and physical harm because the jurisdiction's code of criminal laws offered law enforcement either inadequate or no tools to protect victims of these types of crimes.
Until recently, stay-away or restraining orders were the only means of protection for stalking victims. These traditional measures were rarely effective because they penalized perpetrators only after the orders had been violated -- when the harm they were designed to protect against had already occurred. These orders also often had jurisdictional boundaries which limited their enforcement.
Until recently, states required police to have either an accusation of assault (which, legally, is a threat with the immediate potential for physical harm) or a violation of a protective order before they could protect a victim by arresting the perpetrator.
In the past, police could also use harassment or terroristic threat statutes, but harassment statutes usually carry only misdemeanor penalties and are of limited effectiveness in deterring a stalker. Terroristic threat statutes were also of limited use because they usually did not encompass the types of behavior common to stalkers.