Cyberstalked

When strange men started call­ing a Water­ford woman’s house last sum­mer, say­ing they had seen her pro­file on an adult Web site, her hus­band booted up his own com­puter to investigate.

The woman’s hus­band dis­cov­ered some­one had cre­ated a pro­file for her on sev­eral Inter­net sites and included her home and work phone num­bers and high school year­book pic­ture, accord­ing to a court document.

Then he found out the per­son who posted the infor­ma­tion was Pilar Stofega, a woman he dated eight years ear­lier and who, he told police, had harassed him after they broke up. (From Harass­ment Charged After ‘Vin­dic­tive’ Pro­files Posted.)

I’m sure the (hap­pily unnamed) cou­ple who were harassed don’t feel for­tu­nate right now, but at least the police in their area took the prob­lem seri­ously and did some­thing. Charges of second-degree harass­ment and breach of peace, plus a restrain­ing order, may not be as sat­is­fy­ing as they might have hoped, but the woman is expe­ri­enc­ing sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences. In addi­tion, their names were not spread around in a web-searchable way (as far as I know) to cause poten­tial prob­lems later on.

How long will it take for this kind of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion to be stan­dard instead of news­wor­thy? Well, it has already taken eleven years too long for our fam­ily, and in Geor­gia, at least, noth­ing seems to have changed. Accord­ing to peo­ple who have con­tacted me in the last six months, it is still nearly impos­si­ble to get any law enforce­ment offi­cial to take any action at all based on inter­net activ­ity that isn’t obvi­ously about child pornog­ra­phy, “groom­ing,” or the like.

Obvi­ously, those aren’t unim­por­tant crimes, but nei­ther should they be the sole crimes police are will­ing to investigate.

As Jenny Wieland Ward, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Fam­i­lies and Friends of Vio­lent Crime Vic­tims, said regard­ing another case:

It’s good that police are pur­su­ing peo­ple that com­mit Inter­net crimes…

“More and more the Inter­net is used to vic­tim­ize people—whether it’s to chil­dren or adults—people are find­ing ways to use it in a destruc­tive man­ner,” she said.

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