What it's like to be stalked

"Did you break up with him then?"

Last week, tennis player Emma Raducanu was playing a match in Dubai. She spotted a man who’d been stalking her in the crowd and quickly alerted the umpire. This man, her coach told news outlets, had been stalking her for some time. He “followed her to Singapore, to Abu Dhabi where I was with her, again in Doha, now in Dubai and we noticed him.”

Sadly, not all the news coverage of Raducanu’s ordeal conveyed just how serious this incident was. Nor was it even always reported as stalking. Many outlets called the man ‘fixated,’ one headline referred to him as ‘a fan,’ and Reuters just went with “police detain spectator that left Raducanu in tears.” For me this was a sign that stalking is still not taken as seriously as it should be, which is baffling since the ONS says that one in five women will be a victim of stalking in the UK, and one in seven in the wider population. 

I was stalked. That’s still a sentence that sounds bizarre to me, almost like I’m that one kid at school who tells outrageous lies for attention. It feels like something that happens only to famous people but, as the stats mentioned above show, it’s horrifyingly common. And when you read the ONS definition of what stalking actually is, you might realise you’ve been a victim too.