For January Stalking Awareness Month, 9 Articles About Cyberstalking Every Woman Should Read

January is National Stalking Awareness Month, and this year marks the fifth anniversary of its observance. So why haven't you heard about it?

Probably because "there is still a widespread lack of information on the crime of stalking. A good number of people still think it is a 'celebrity issue,'" says one CEO of a national victim's advocacy group.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, stalking is a very real threat to many normal 'average' women:

Data from a 2005 CDC study indicated that approximately 7 million women and 2 million men in the United States had been stalked at some time during their lifetime....often, the stalker is a spouse or partner, ex-spouse, acquaintance, or family member....

Stalking...can lead to violence. In an estimated 25%--35% of cases, stalkers commit violence against the persons they are stalking....A 10-city, nationally representative study of female homicide victims conducted in 1999 indicated that 76% of female victims of intimate partner homicides were stalked by their partners before they were killed.

A relatively recent development is cyberstalking -- a crime so new that few laws are on the books to deal with the destructive activity of its perpetrators.

I thought cyberstalking was restricted to online behavior such as the threatening comments one sees in chat rooms and forums. But cyberstalking expert (and former victim) Alexis A. Moore set the record straight, and explained how any woman can be the target of a cyberstalker and not even own a computer.

To help educate us all about cyberstalking during Stalking Awareness Month, she's written a series of nine articles that every woman should read. Don't just skip over this and say, "It could never happen to me." Moore once thought the same thing, and she had to learn the hard way how very wrong she was.

Cyberstalking Article Index:

• What is Cyberstalking?
• When Stalking Goes Online - Examples of Cyberstalking
• Cyberstalking and Women - Facts and Statistics
• "I Was a Victim of Cyberstalking" - One Woman's Story
• Cyberstalking, Spyware, and Privacy Protection
• Cyberstalking and Your Credit Rating
• What is Datafurnishing?
• How Cyberstalkers Obtain Your Personal Information
• 12 Tips To Protect Yourself From Cyberstalking