Stalking is not something we necessarily have a very good understanding of as a society. We tend to imagine stalkers as sad individuals with so little going on in their own lives that they fully attach themselves to someone else’s. We envisage stalking in a simplistic way – we conjure up images of a man following a woman around dark corners and sneaking into her garden to simply be near her. Most troubling is that our popular image of the stalker often paints them as a creepy but ultimately harmless figure – too sad to be taken seriously.

But this could not be any further from the truth. A 2017 study from the University of Gloucestershire found that stalking behaviours were present in 94% of intimate partner or domestic homicides. Dr Jane Monckton Smith, a researcher leading on the study, urged police forces to reconsider their methods of assessing risk…