In September 2013, I was feeling completely defeated and disillusioned after facing the reality that I was not living in the “free society” that I had always believed in. My sister and my young niece were being taunted, tormented and terrorized by the person who vowed to cherish and protect them. Although I was accustomed to working with families in crisis and had a working knowledge of the Family Court process from both professional and personal experience, I had never witnessed the intensity of a serious stalker. This person was indefatigable in his desire to get back his “property.” Nobody who had contact with his wife or child was immune to his slanderous rage. The years had not soothed his psychosis; in fact, he was becoming more determined to enact his revenge. It became clear that his loss of control was turning him into a ticking time-bomb, and he felt he had nothing to live for. My family worried that he would take his former family with him.
New York has anti-stalking laws, but they are obscure and rarely enforced, especially in rural areas with short-staffed police departments. Small town prosecutors don’t want to touch these cases. That was unacceptable to me, and though I could do little to protect my own family, I could tell others about the injustices faced by stalking victims. I began blogging about the issues they face. Having spent these past few years drawing attention to these inadequacies, I realized that they occur in every state, not just ours. Through my data collection and research, I found that these problems have much deeper roots. Not only do we have a systemic failure of protecting victims’ rights, but there is also a moral failure to acknowledge them at all. We live in our fragile “bubbles,” where no harm can befall us until it actually DOES.
Our blissful ignorance leads to the social acceptance of terrible crimes. Why? Because we cannot handle the thought that evil does exist and nobody is immune to it. People who are “nice guys” can become predators if they continue to feed dysfunctional thoughts and allow their primitive brain to take over. In this case, my former brother-in-law took his own life and nobody else’s, thankfully. But recent trends show us that increasingly, seriously disturbed individuals are taking other lives too. After the fact, the stories are similar: a few warning signs, the family hadn’t worried about them, and the horrible sense of guilt that it all could have been prevented. I think we are at a crossroads as a human race where what we do next will determine the future of our children and the type of society that they will live in. We have an opportunity to move from denial and fear to acknowledgment and freedom.
It is for the children’s sake that I feel compelled to further explore these issues. Therefore, I have decided to increase the focus of this community and changing our name to one that fully reflects this. We will be called “The Human Mirror,” and I hope you will stick with us and support the new venture. I have no plans to delete the Human Rights Vs. Stalkers site so those who need it will be able to find it. We will still discuss victimization along with other current social issues. The primary mission of saving lives will continue to guide us as we move forward, along with the vision to build an awareness of how our lives can become agents of social change in exciting new ways. Thank you for your support.
Is Now The Human Mirror 