Surviving Stalking, Michele Pathé, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, £17.95 pb, 174 pp., ISBN: 0 521 00964 2

Stalking is a significant social problem whose frequency is almost certainly increasing. Estimates of the prevalence of stalking vary widely with the definitions used and the populations studied. If however, we confine ourselves to the more severe end of the stalking spectrum, involving harassment and pursuit lasting for months on end, then currently 5–10% of people fall victim to such behaviour. Those stalked are predominantly young women, although no one, regardless of age and gender, is exempt from such unwanted attention. People who are being stalked not infrequently seek help for their psychological distress from general practitioners and mental health professionals. They often request advice from those professionals about how they should respond to the stalking, how long it is likely to last and whether they are at risk of physical attack. Clinical experience suggests that the answers and advice they receive are all too often ill-informed and on occasion positively hazardous. The situation is analogous to domestic violence, in that clinicians should know enough about stalking and its impact to be able to provide help, support and advice to patients afflicted by this form of victimisation.

There is no shortage of books about stalking which cover the topic in a variety of ways, from the sensational, through the journalistic, to the scholarly. What has been lacking, however, is a guide to the impact of stalking on the person targeted and how best to manage being stalked. Dr Pathé has written just such a practical and straightforward account. This book is a goldmine of information on the best response to being stalked. It also contains a wealth of information relevant to clinicians. The book is well written and, unlike so many books by professionals intended for a general readership, never slides into becoming either dull or patronising. The book is further enhanced by chapters from Doreen Orion and Edward Petch, who place the advice for clinicians and their patients in the context of the law and practice in the USA and the UK respectively. This enables the reader to move from broad advice and information relevant to all stalking situations to the specifics of the law and support organisations available in the UK, USA or Australia. Hopefully, in future editions chapters on European and other jurisdictions with effective anti-stalking legislation services will also appear.

The book provides a balanced account of the nature of stalking, who stalks, what are the risks of being assaulted and even on the best methods of managing stalkers. Perhaps the most important contributions, however, for clinicians and patients alike, are the chapters on the impact of stalking, how to reduce the chances of becoming a stalking victim, and if you do experience such behaviour, how best to minimise the impact and evade the stalker. The book is full of sensible and practical advice derived from Dr Pathé's long experience of working with people who have been stalked.

One pleasure for this reviewer was the book's comparisons between the legislative frameworks for dealing with stalking in the various states of the USA and Australia and that of the UK. Only the UK legislative response requires a flowchart to illustrate its functioning: Dr Petch, in a gallant attempt to explain the functioning of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, resorts to a diagram that contains no fewer than 46 separate boxes connected by a plethora of arrows going in each and every direction. This byzantine nightmare represents the response of the law of England and Wales to what is a relatively commonplace social problem. Time will tell whether those experiencing the attentions of a stalker are better served by the simple and direct legislation of most jurisdictions or the many-headed hydra of the Protection from Harassment Act.

This book is essential reading for clinicians and can be safely recommended to general readers as a sensible, practical and eminently well-informed account of stalking.