The student group Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment hosted an informational session about stalking Thursday as part of National Stalking Awareness Month.
Rebecca Dreke, the senior program associate for the National Center for Victims of Crime, said students should take stalking seriously.
""Stalking does take this backseat when we're looking at dating violence or sexual violence,"" she said. ""People think it's not that serious, that it's just a joke, that if you ignore it, it will go away, or that it only happens to celebrities.""
According to Dreke, stalking is an evasive crime because it uses legal actions to create fear in the victim.
Kari Mickelson, PAVE outreach coordinator, said stalking can be difficult to define.
""Stalking is hard to deal with because the thing that defines stalking is whether or not the victim feels fear,"" she said. ""It's usually behaviors that wouldn't otherwise be criminal like sending an e-mail or calling them. Normally that would be fine, but when repeated over and over again, it becomes a crime.""
According to Dreke, stalking criminalizes what is otherwise noncriminal behavior.
""When they're put together as a pattern of behavior directed at that person that causes that person to feel fear is when you have the crime of stalking,"" she said.
Dreke said stalking is more prevalent on college campuses than in the general population.
""A lot of campuses, even huge ones like this campus, are sort of closed environments,"" she said. ""You have routines; you're going to school, you're going to work, then you're going out with your friends. A lot of times, there is only one degree of separation between you and everybody else on campus.""
She added that stalking often occurs between two people who know each other.
""A lot of people think it's just the old stereotype: the stranger, the Peeping Tom or the person watching form afar, but that's not the case,"" Dreke said. ""Only about 10 percent of the cases is it a stranger.""
For more information about safety tips regarding stalking, visit www.ncvc.org.
