As Sexual Assault Awareness Month draws to a close, we at Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment hope students have learned a lot about rape and how it affects this campus. It’s important, however, that we recognize sexual assault is not the only issue PAVE and the campus at large need to concern itself with. Stalking, too, is something facing numerous students on campus, as one in 12 women and one in 45 men will be victims of stalking. However, we don’t always see people on campus or the media take the issue seriously.
This past February, Virgin Mobile launched new commercials advertising their Android-powered phones. The advertisements feature a “crazy” woman stalking her date by following his Facebook, reading his Twitter updates, watching his Four-Square check-ins for patterns and going through his Flickr streams, all using her phone. Referring to how great she thinks the phone’s features are, she ends the commercial by saying, “It’s crazy, right?,” a line meant to imply her own insanity.
Not only are these commercials reinforcing typical gender stereotypes (e.g., girls use Facebook to “creep” on people), but they are also an example of society’s insensitive attitudes toward stalking victims. Stalking is a serious crime, but the term is often used in a trivial manner in our day-to-day language. For example, how often do you or people you know use the phrase “I totally Facebook stalked you last night”? This use of the term “stalking” in such casual contexts takes away from the traumatic experiences of those who are actually victims of this crime.
The Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence defines stalking as “a pattern of behavior that makes the victim feel afraid, nervous, harassed or in danger, and includes actions meant to harass, track and/or frighten.” These behaviors may include knowing the victim’s schedule, showing up at places he or she goes to, sending unwanted gifts, emails or texts, or calling the victim repeatedly. For those who experience these behaviors, they are not funny but terrifying, and give reason to believe one’s safety is in danger.
By showing a woman sitting in a tree to spy on her date, Virgin Mobile trivializes a heinous crime that affects thousands of individuals each year. They are essentially treating the issue as a laughing matter, urging all Virgin Mobile users to “Go Crazy on Android.”
It is also worth noting that had the roles in the commercial been reversed – the stalker was the male and the victim was the female – the commercial would have been a topic of great anger, likely never making it to the air at all. As one individual on YouTube commented, “Imagine this ad, if the stalker was a dude instead. Much, much less funny.” Neither version is funny, but the concept of a woman as a stalker is not questioned at all. Stalking is never funny, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator, something society, and clearly Virgin Mobile, needs to understand.
The fact is, one in four stalking victims are stalked through the use of technology. One study found 13 percent of college women were stalked in a year (Fisher and Cullen, 2000), and the rates undoubtedly increase as technology continues to advance. The Android commercials by Virgin Mobile are an outright display of disrespect toward stalking victims and raise the important and unfortunate issue of ignorance about stalking in our society.
To find out what you can do to help stop stalking, visit www.uwpave.com or stop by the PAVE office in the Student Activity Center for more information.
Sapir Sasson ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in psychology. She is a PAVE Media Volunteer.
