Eugene Volokh writes about an interesting legal question:
I’m inclined to side with the parents’ right to control their minor child’s contact with both adults and with other minor children as a matter of correct legal outcome. I’m not so sure I see it as a wise decision except in extreme circumstances.
Wouldn’t you get the court order addressed to the parents of the other minor teenager?
Not, “Bobby, you can’t come and visit Janey,” but “Mr. and Mrs. Jones, you must prevent your son Bobby from coming and visiting Janey.”
Otherwise, I don’t quite see why not. Court orders are part of how a society orders itself. If people can’t maintain proper social boundaries, the courts are here to protect us.
What’s the difference between a 16 year old creepy stalker and a 22 year old creepy stalker?
I’ve definitely heard of minors getting restraining orders prohibiting them from contacting another minor or coming within a certain distance. Most of them were for bullying situations, and included kids as young as elementary school.
:eek:
It’s a shame grounding one’s own child doesn’t work and one has to escalate to a legal remedy.
What do you consider an extreme circumstance?
I think it is a bad legal decision. This is clearly not stalking. The girl didn’t feel threatened. Her mother didn’t feel threatened. This is a parental discipline issue that is not new or in need of state involvement.
It is part of a disturbing trend (at least around here, and from what I gather from the article, in other places as well) to transform domestic violence protection orders into tools of harassment.
[QUOTE=OK definition of stalking]
Stalking also means a course of conduct composed of a series of two or more separate acts over a period of time, however short, evidencing a continuity of purpose or unconsented contact with a person that is initiated or continued without the consent of the individual or in disregard of the expressed desire of the individual that the contact be avoided or discontinued.
[/QUOTE]
This is far too broad. Imagine the following exchange of threads.
Bricker: I do not want you to direct your posts to me any more.
jtgain: Why?
Bricker: I do not believe that you debate fairly. Do not contact me.
jtgain: I disagree that I do not debate fairly. You are being unreasonable.
Under OK law, it seems that I have now stalked you, and you may get a restraining order against me. I also must surrender all firearms and concealed carry permits.
To play devil’s advocate, once told not to contact, what “right” (not necessarily using the term in its legal sense here) do you have to respond by arguing and saying, no, I have the right to talk to you whether you like it or not?
First, I skipped past the imagine sentence and thought you were really summarizing an exchange between you and Bricker. That sure got my attention.
As for the content, I would think that if you continued to direct your posts to Bricker despite his request for you not to do so, the action would become stalking, yes? Let’s say that 100 posts following him around would qualify. What number between the first and the 100th would become stalking?
I think at the outset we should realize that stalking laws are a creature of statute that are only about 25 years old and enacted because of extreme and high profile examples of intolerable abuses. These laws also represent an infringement on otherwise legal rights of association and free speech. This is even more pronounced when such purported stalking occurs on a public message board or other types of electronic communication where the harm can be resolved by clicking an “ignore” button.
We see how far it is gone when a state court mentioned in the OP has held that stalking is when a 14 year old kid who a parent thinks is a “bad apple” hangs around her own child. This is such a departure from the meaning and purpose of these laws.
If I were to follow Bricker around the board 100 times, I think the board could certainly sanction me, and others would rightfully call me an asshole, but I don’t believe that stalking is the appropriate term because it minimalizes the serious nature of that term. It makes no distinction between me standing on the street outside his house and posting on a public message board.
And again, it stifles speech and robust debate. Are you sure that in those 100 posts I am really following Bricker around, or does it just so happen that as we are both lawyers and conservatives, we naturally post in the same threads on the same topics? Since I do not want the accusation of stalking and the penalties associated with it, I might refrain from posting in many threads. Of course, some will see that as a feature instead of a bug ( 
) but one can easily see how personal disputes can lead to serious consequences for an otherwise innocent party. See the 14 year old in the OP.
Well,
I am personally connected to the origin of stalking laws in the state of Oklahoma.
My sister was stalked for a period of about 2 years. (this was back in the early 80’s) She was stalked by a man she dated two times and then when he started talking about their wedding, on their second date, she told him she wasn’t interested. He followed her everywhere she went. She worked the night shift and he followed her to work at 10:30 PM, sat in the parking lot and followed her home. (she was a computer programmer at the time)
Occasionally she would come out and her tires would be slashed. (he would offer her a ride) Or once her car was rammed 5 times, (once in each door)
The police were sympathetic but could do nothing. They did occasionally pull him over and give his car a safety inspection, allowing my sister a brief time in public without him.
Add also the phone calls where nobody would speak on the other end. (later traced back to him and his mother’s house)
He lost his job during this was supported by his family.
We lived on a dead end street. He would park at the end and wait for her to leave for work. My father went up one night to talk to him. I don’t know exactly what happened but the stalker tried to leave and my father was holding on to the car or was caught on the car but he was dragged down the length of the street only falling off as the stalker turned.
A little later, (an hour?) my father died of a massive heart attack.
That is stalking.
What this woman did is not stalking. It’s not ‘right’ either and if the mother of a 14 year old says stay away, then you should respect that. But don’t call it stalking. I find it insulting.
Okay, let’s say Boy A is into Girl B, but she’s not into him. He doesn’t take no for an answer and harasses her to the point of stalking and so her parents get a restraining order.
But Boy A and Girl B are in the same Geometry class and have the same lunch period. Is the school now required to put them in different sections of the class? Do they have to transfer one of the kids to another school? What if they ride the same bus to and from school – does the bus driver now have to police contact between them?
How, exactly, do you enforce a restraining order in such a situation?
Also, what parent of teenagers actually believes something like a piece of paper will prevent kids from talking to each other? Unless both kids are in 100% lockdown, 24/7, and both sets of parents are on board (and we could be talking about four pairs of parents) and support the restraining order, I can’t see how this would be effective. I’m not even convinced that restraining orders between legal adults are really all that effective. They only give recourse to the victim when the intended target of restraint breaks the order. If a parent wants to prevent their child from interacting with another child, aren’t there a lot less complicated and far more effective means?
What about a youngster that age who has some classmates who follow her everywhere, even get a job in the same place where she does, and put a tap on the family’s phone? That happened to me, and one of the perps was the son of a Federal judge, so nothing could be done about it. As for my parents, their attitude about it was that whatever I had done to those boys to make them want to do this to me was probably something I had cooked up on purpose to embarrass them. :smack:
Also, in the early 1980s, one of my friends lost her best friend in a murder/suicide. It was a boy who claimed that he wanted to date her and she said no, and he too had relentlessly stalked her (and his father was also a prominent attorney in this city). Whenever her parents went to the authorities, THEY were told that SHE had to stay away from him. By all accounts, nobody, except maybe her parents, even so much as sat him down and told him that he had to knock it off and leave her alone. They were both about 16 years old.
BTW, Zebra, what ended up happening to the guy who stalked her?
As for the people who did this to me, I am surprised that the judge’s son hasn’t been arrested for some white-collar crime and then connected to all the missing prostitutes, that kind of thing. I tried looking for the other boy online (mainly for his criminal record; I’m sure he has one) and couldn’t find any evidence of him online, which makes me think he’s deceased. The judge’s son graduated near the top of the class, academically, and despite this, from grade school on he was on most parents’ “Do not associate with this person” lists. His parents let him have keggers from about 7th grade on, presumably so he would think he had friends. :dubious: My sister, who’s 7 years younger, later became friends with his sister, and I told our parents to never, ever let her go over to their house, even if they knew he wouldn’t be there. They had already heard this more than once from other parents.
You’re jumbling two things together that aren’t really related, and it’s making things confusing. Stalking requires following someone around. Merely talking to them when you happen to run into them is not stalking, even if they have asked you not to talk to them. Do you really think the mods would enforce the no stalking rule if I asked you not to respond to this post?
So what you need is the idea that someone is deliberately following Bricker around to talk to him. Now, how can you establish that with only two samples? Other than jtgain announcing his intent to follow him around, how do you establish that he is doing so? Crossing paths twice is just too easily coincidental.
Let’s also say that 100 “accidental” crossings, within a certain time span, is something everyone agrees is unreasonable. So 2 is okay, 100 is unreasonable. Does it follow that there must be some sort of bright line? Of course not. That’s the semantic slippery slope fallacy. Is there a percentage of hair coverage that marks someone as bald? No. So does it follow that losing just two hairs makes you bald? Of course not.
The situation in the OP can not happen in New Jersey.
The vast majority of restraining orders are from domestic violence. There does not seem to be any underlying domestic violence charge. Besides if both parties are juveniles they do not fall under the domestic violence statute except under extraordinary circumstances. DV restraining orders are civil matters and do not require a conviction or even that charges be filed.
A much more infrequent restraining order can be given upon conviction when charged with stalking. That is if there is not a domestic relationship between the two parties. Otherwise it would fall under domestic violence.
The third type I am aware of is under Nicole’s Law. That is when upon filing of sexual assault charges the victim can request a restraining order. Again, it may already fall under the domestic violence statute depending on the relationship of the two parties.
None of that fits the OP.
Stalking goes beyond that. Our statute states:
Having repeated contact for the purpose to annoy someone is harassment.
The same way it works in college. I knew a girl who got a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend because he was really distraught about her getting an abortion. They were both in the same music theory class. At first they just had to sit on opposite sides of the room from each other. Eventually the school worked out a way they could be in separate classes. Then, the guy wound up transferring, albeit not because of the restraining order. I think she may also have transferred, as I never saw her again. (I was actually closer to the guy.)
It’s not like these sorts of situations don’t come up with adults. What if they both work at the same job? A restraining order doesn’t require much proof–would it be fair for the boss to just fire the other guy? No, reasonable accommodations would be made. That’s why you have those X feet rules anwyays. You’d better bet both of the aforementioned college students knew exactly how far they had to sit from each other in class.
And I really don’t see why it would be any easier to enforce a restraining order on adults. Kids have cell phones and friends with cell phones. Kids often have less transportation, meaning someone else has to be involved to break the restraining order. Plus kids have other authority figures that can intervene–yes, including the bus driver.
You think he’s not going to just put them on opposite ends of the bus?
I was working within the confines of this message board, since that was how I took the hypothetical given. I believe jtgain was trying to show how stupid the OK law was by relating it to this message board. And the no-stalking rule here does not require a threat of bodily harm–that would be a bannable offense if it happened once.
Assuming the quoted language posed about the OK stalking law is accurate (and that’s debatable; I haven’t looked it up), unfortunately, it tends to take far too long before a case makes its way to the state supreme court to challenge the constitutionality of bullshit statutes like this. Definitely too broad and vague, and if it’s accurate, it’s interesting that OK legislators didn’t look to fairly standard language from other states’ stalking statute. You can apply this as written to virtually ANY situation, including parent/child. Stalking laws typically include an element that the object of the attention is in reasonable fear of death, serious bodily injury, rape or kidnapping.
OK is starting to rival TX and FL for shitty lawmaking/lawmakers being allowed to run amuck.