The Defuse Podcast: Where Experts Defuse Real Threats
When the threats are real and the stakes are high — what actually works?
Right now, as you're reading this, someone's watching your family, your business rivals are digging through your digital history, and a disgruntled employee knows exactly where your vulnerabilities are. While you're focused on your day job, they're building a plan.
This podcast exists because ignoring threats doesn't make them disappear.
I'm Philip Grindell — former Scotland Yard detective, behavioural threat specialist, and author of Personal Threat Management. After Jo Cox MP was murdered, I was tasked with creating Parliament's specialist threat assessment team. I've spent 35 years stopping people who wanted to hurt prominent individuals, from MPs to royalty to the ultra-wealthy.
What You'll Get From Listening
You'll recognise the warning signs everyone else misses. That "helpful" new employee asking odd questions. The photographer at three different family events. The online critic whose interest feels too personal.
You'll understand how dangerous people operate. The people planning to harm you treat you like a research project — cataloguing your habits, weaknesses, and blind spots whilst you're oblivious.
You'll know what to do when a crisis hits. Not theory — actual steps. How to control the narrative when your reputation's under attack. When to stay silent and when silence destroys you.
You'll discover what's already out there about you. Right now, strangers can map your life using tools you've never heard of.
What You'll Hear
Straight-talking conversations with ex-FBI agents who've tracked serial killers, digital investigators who can find anyone online, crisis managers who've saved billion-pound reputations, and psychologists who understand exactly how fixated individuals think.
Topics include stalking, fixated individuals, insider threats, protective intelligence, reputation management, OSINT, digital vulnerability, and crisis leadership.
These aren't interviews — they're operational briefings. Real cases, real tactics, real consequences.
Who This Is For
You must understand modern threats if you're responsible for protecting someone important (yourself, your family, or your boss). Physical violence is just one possibility. Reputation assassination, digital stalking, insider betrayal — these happen far more often and can be just as devastating.
If you're prominent enough to be a target, you already are one. The question isn't whether someone's paying attention to you — it's whether you're paying attention to them.
What Makes This Different
No corporate nonsense. I've watched too many good people get hurt because they received sanitised advice from people who'd never faced real threats. You'll get the truth, even when it's uncomfortable.
Experience that matters. I've identified planned terrorist attacks, managed stalking cases involving royalty, and helped ultra-wealthy families navigate threats they never considered. Every recommendation comes from cases where lives and reputations were on the line.
Stories that stick. Theory doesn't save lives — understanding does. Every episode includes real cases that show you what threats look like before they turn dangerous.
Because the people planning to hurt you aren't taking the day off.
Subscribe now and learn how to manage threats before they become crises.
The Defuse Podcast: Where Experts Defuse Real Threats
The Omnipresence of Fear: Understanding Stalker Psychology with Kerry Daynes
This episode features forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes discussing her 25-year career and expertise in stalking behaviour. Kerry transitioned from advertising plans to forensic psychology after university, despite being told it was "no job for a girl." She trained through the NHS rather than the typical prison service route.
Key Professional Insights: Kerry advocates for "rational compassion" - maintaining realistic risk assessments whilst treating individuals with dignity. She argues against forcing people into neat psychological categories, emphasising that everyone requires individual understanding.
Stalking vs Harassment: Stalking involves deeper fixation and obsession than harassment. Stalkers gather unnecessary information and seek proximity to victims. The UK recognises five stalker types: rejected (highest violence risk), intimacy-seeking, incompetent suitors, resentful, and predatory stalkers.
Risk Assessment Problems: The widely-used DASH risk assessment tool lacks scientific validity despite being standard across UK police forces. This "quick and dirty" approach fails because it attempts to assess domestic abuse, stalking, and honour-based abuse with one inadequate tool.
Personal Experience: Kerry shares her own stalking experience, describing the victim's sense of "omnipresence" - feeling unsafe everywhere. Victims typically shrink their lives and experience hypervigilance, which others often dismiss as paranoia.
Societal Issues: Popular culture romanticises stalking through films like Beauty and the Beast and Twilight. Social media and data oversharing have made stalking easier while creating unrealistic expectations about pursuing romantic interests.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-daynes-aa8b5740/
https://www.instagram.com/kerrydaynespsychologist/?hl=en
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Welcome to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Grindell, CEO and founder of Diffuse, a global threat and intelligence consultancy that blends psychology and intelligence to mitigate threats and risks to prominent people and brands.
Speaker 2:It's been a while since we've published. We've had the summer off, which has been absolutely wonderful, but we're back now, and we're back with a very special guest who I actually only met in person this last 12 months because we both took part in a documentary which we may talk about during this. We may have a conversation around it, but I've known about Kerry for a long time, read her books and followed her, and I'm delighted to welcome Kerry Danes onto the show today.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I'm pleased to be here.
Speaker 2:It's delightful to have you, kerry, and thank you for being a guest on this, because I promised you this ages ago because we were speaking, but it's great to have you on For those people who may not know who you are or may have heard about you but don't know your story. How would you describe yourself?
Speaker 3:Quite a few things at the moment. I am a forensic psychologist that is ultimately what I am and I'm a forensic psychologist who has been extremely lucky to have worked in various different areas. So I've worked in prisons, in secure units. I've also worked with the police. I've worked extensively with the courts as an expert witness. But I suppose I'd also call myself a broadcaster I think that's the term these days in that I pop up in the media every now and again, and I think that's how most people know me. So, as you say, you've read my books, I'm an author and I'm also a media production psychologist, believe it or not. So wearing quite a few hats at the moment.
Speaker 2:So what is a media psychologist? So what is a media psychologist?
Speaker 3:A media production psychologist is somebody who works behind the scenes in media production, so in documentaries, to make sure that everybody is safe and their welfare is being taken seriously. That kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Or might work in an advisory role.
Speaker 3:OK, I've not heard of that before, but I think it's a great move further and further into media, which was never part of the plan. But there you go. Things don't always go to plan, do they no?
Speaker 2:exactly. So I mean talking about plans. Then you know you you've obviously got a uh, an impressive cv. You you've worked incredibly hard over the 25 years of frontline experience. But you went to study psychology at Sheffield. I understand why. What was it about psychology that interested you?
Speaker 3:I went to Sheffield University to study psychology because I wanted to go into advertising, I wanted to be an advertising executive, and it all went horribly, horribly wrong. And it went horribly wrong because all of the good-looking boys were in the queue for the law subsidiaries. So, and there was one particular very good-looking boy who I never actually got the courage to speak to, but whilst gazing at the back of his beautiful head in lectures, I decided that I really had quite a passion for the law as well as psychology, and so I changed career paths. I decided that I wanted to be a forensic psychologist, and somebody said to me oh, you know, that's no job for a girl, that's no job for a slip of a girl. You know, women don't do that, which is ridiculous because 85%, roughly, of forensic psychologists are women. But that was like a red rag to a bull at that point. So I was going to become a forensic psychologist. At that point, come hell or high water.
Speaker 2:And what's the journey then? To become a forensic psychologist.
Speaker 3:Oh, my goodness. Well, I think that the journey's changed considerably in the 30 years since I've been a forensic psychologist. So show my age there. For me the journey was trying to get a assistant, an assistant post, an assistant psychology post. That's the hardest part, because so many, so many applications for one job, because so many applications for one job. And so I went to work voluntarily at Wakefield Prison so maximum security prison and from there I did manage to get myself an assistant psychologist post.
Speaker 3:Now most forensic psychologists do their training in the prison service, do their training in the prison service, and I was somewhat of an anomaly because actually I was trained by the NHS to be a forensic psychologist and I think that I was just one of two at that time. So I did my training in secure psychiatric hospitals and of course you've got to do your training. So for me that was a two year master's degree Now we have doctorates in forensic psychology and then I had to prove myself through supervised practice, which was three years. So I think it took me around five years to qualify. But I always say it's like the Hunger Games, and I don't think things have changed in that respect. It's still like the Hunger Games, and I don't think things have changed in that respect. It's still like the Hunger Games in that it's very, very difficult to to get that, that assistant psychology post, and then make the make the leap into somebody paying for your training while you, while you, work for them.
Speaker 2:So what was it like that day then, the first day that you turned up at Wakefield Prison? Oh, gosh.
Speaker 3:Well, it wasn't the first time I'd been in a prison, because I had had the foresight to go and visit was it still called Strangeways back in the day? I'm not sure. Manchester, yeah, and I was shown around the landings by a rather fed up and beleaguered looking prison officer and I remember asking him why, why are all the men on the landings? Why are they all making meow noises at me? Why are they making cat noises? And I just remember him, you know, roll of the eyes thinking oh, you're going, oh, you're going to get slaughtered. Woman, this is not a good career choice for you.
Speaker 3:On my first day at Wakefield I was nowhere near the landings, of course, because it was induction, so it was training how to hold your keys so that people can't copy them, you know how to stash them in your little bag and your chain and all of this kind of thing Security. I think it was a week-long induction, so I didn't meet any inmates. At that point I met prison officers and I thought, oh, these are the good guys, these are the guys that are going to be looking out for me. Keep me safe. You know, these are the ones that are going to be looking out for me. Keep me safe. Um, you know, these are the ones with the with the halos over their heads. The bad guys are all the guys on the landing in the prison issue sweats and I think that it took half an hour for the prison officers to start running a book on who would have sex with me oh right, so the kind of harassment piece and sexualization and all that.
Speaker 3:yeah, so I we're talking. This was June 1996. Yeah, this was 1996. I'd like to think that things had changed. You know whether they've changed or not. I don't know Whether they've just gone a little bit. You know more secretive At that point, it was blatant. So it was a difficult environment, but it was a learning curve. It was a very steep, painful learning curve, a bit of a baptism of fire really, but I'm grateful for it in hindsight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you walked into a secure psychiatric ward, how different was that from walking into a maximum security prison?
Speaker 3:Vastly different, much, much smaller. My first job was working with forensic learning disabilities. So men that had learning disabilities in a fairly small unit I think that there was about 14, 15 patients and they all had a, you know a pool table, pool queues. So that showed you a little bit about, you know, the level of security, the fact that they were allowed pool queues. Most of them were were sex offenders. So there were some very interesting situations that I would get myself involved in. I remember we had one client who was six foot five and built like a brick toilet. It had a huge belly and would hide, or think he was hiding, you know, stark naked behind the curtain and of course you'd see this great big bulge in the curtain. You'd see these feet at the bottom. And so I got very adept at making sure that I was always looking him in the eye when I told him to get out from behind the curtain and go and put some clothes on please.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow. So what was the big learnings then? What did you learn about? I guess about people then doing that.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, gosh, I mean, it's difficult to put into words. So so much really it was. It was a learning curve for me because I'd come from really quite a sheltered background, a very working class background, but nevertheless I was protected, I was secure, I'd never had bad experiences with men, and so I had to wise up really and that was on top of me, trying to project this image of myself as, look, I'm going to be this great forensic psychologist, because I was very, very ambitious at the time and I think I was quite officious in some respects as well, probably not the easiest to work with or deal with. But I think that what I found is that we can't put people into neat little boxes and we try to as psychologists. We really try to. You can't force people into neat little boxes. Don't force people into neat little boxes.
Speaker 3:Everybody is a very nuanced little jigsaw of their own, with good and bad qualities and everything in between, and it really is a matter of just trying to put that jigsaw together, understand the individual. And I think what I learn is that you've got to treat people with what I call rational compassion. So the rational part of it is about being very, very, very realistic about the dangers that they might pose and very realistic about how they've behaved in the past and how they may behave in the future, but also seeing them as fully rounded human beings who are deserving of compassion, which is very different to empathy. I don't feel sorry for anybody. I'm not brimming with sympathy, but I have compassion for people. I view them all as human beings.
Speaker 2:So what's then the difference? There's an interesting kind of sideline then about compassion and empathy. How would you then the difference? There's an interesting kind of sideline then about compassion and empathy. How would you describe the differences?
Speaker 3:I think that compassion is about having an understanding about somebody's human rights, and I think that empathy is about feeling what they feel. And I think that if you start to feel what they feel, you can start to make a lot of excuses for people. So, for example, many of the people that I've worked with have been horribly traumatized and abused, but it's not for me to feel empathy for that and to feel sorry for them, because that might interrupt my risk assessment of them. It might mean that I'm not that realistic. So it's. I would say that compassion is a lot less emotive. It's about recognizing that somebody is a human being and they deserve dignity and respect and yet not, you know, brimming with tears for them or, you know, getting too involved in the pathos of their stories.
Speaker 3:So you've got to be I suppose this links into the rational part of it you've got to be logical and detached to some extent to work in this environment. But that doesn't mean that you have to be cold, and I think that I was told whilst working at Wakefield Prison by prison officers and also by fellow psychologists, that I had to learn to not feel, which is ridiculous really. So, you know, telling somebody that they can't feel that they've got to be somewhat of an you know, a robot. I used to think, gosh, do these psychologists come into work in the morning? Are they switched on? Is there a switch at the back of their head? They really lacked compassion and that didn't sit right with me, me. But I think that once you've really got the understanding of the difference between empathy, sympathy and compassion, that's when you can move forward with a level of authenticity and really work with people on a deep level.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting you mentioned earlier on around not putting people in boxes, and I've often wondered is that a human trait though, to put people in boxes Because we talk about race or nationality or sex or whatever we like to put people? We like labels. Don't we to explain who people are?
Speaker 3:We absolutely do, and it's human. We take in so much information during the day, we've got to try and sort it somehow, haven't we? And so we do put people into boxes and we love to, uh, ascribe labels to people, and people love to ascribe labels to themselves, especially at the moment, particularly if they you know, if you go on tiktok, there is a million and one people telling you what label you should be attaching to yourself. It's, it's very strange, um, and you can't avoid that completely.
Speaker 3:But we are so much more than the boxes that we try and squeeze ourselves or other people into, and I think that it's nice to have information and models. Obviously, I work with psychological models, but people don't just conveniently fit into those psychological models, which means that you have to be a bit more dexterous in your thinking and sometimes you have to blend models or you just have to make a psychological formulation all of your own. So I think it comes with experience as a psychologist to know which models to go to and which are going to be useful in this situation, but also the ability to move outside of those models to gain a much more complex understanding of an individual.
Speaker 2:I think is what comes with with age as a psychologist and so because you know, I think about terms that are popular now in terms of oh, he's narcissistic or or he's a psychopath, and yet they're actually quite broad diagnosis, in a way.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And who hasn't called somebody a psychopath? Your ex-boyfriend is a psychopath, your boss is a psychopath. We use them so frequently that we've watered them down and they can become meaningless. So if I'm going to say that somebody is a psychopath, I'm going to say that they score probably around the 30 mark, definitely above 25, on a psychopathy checklist. Or I'm going to say I think this person is a psychopath, but they're a successful psychopath and they don't necessarily fit into that model and wouldn't score highly on a psychopathy checklist because they're working, you know, in Westminster at this time, this, this, this, this and this trait. So I just think that, generally speaking, it's better to describe, say what you see, rather than just describe a label, particularly a very broad, overused label that people argue about and there are various different versions of.
Speaker 2:Anyway, and the other thing is that when people are given labels, they then sometimes want to hide behind that label as an excuse that I can't help how I am, because I'm a whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, what did I see on X the other day that I nearly retweeted Something like you know, having a diagnosis doesn't give you free reign to be a dick, basically, and I've always said that it really doesn't. It's not, it's not an excuse. Having said that, diagnoses for some people can be really life-changing. So particularly I'm thinking about people who maybe have been on the autistic spectrum and then they've been given a diagnosis and suddenly all of these behaviors make sense and their differences from other people make sense and they stop blaming themselves for that. So this is it.
Speaker 3:There are no clear answers. Really, I'm always very careful. I'm not the person who diagnoses. That is a psychiatrist job. But, um, if I do suggest a diagnosis because quite often a psychiatrist will look to a psychologist to make suggestions ie do the job for them. And if I'm going to suggest diagnosis, I will only do that if I think that they are going to be useful in some way, they're going to be practically useful and they're going to be useful to that individual or they're necessary for that individual to get the right kind of service.
Speaker 2:Moving forward, so a question. I mean we're going off off track of what we sort of said we're going to talk about, but it's an interesting one because I I see so many stories now of people who've been diagnosed with adhd and I don't know whether that's because we are more aware of it and therefore more people are having the opportunity to take the test and understand themselves more, or whether we just like giving each other labels and actually it's a cover for certain behaviours.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, you can't have a little bit of ADHD. You've got to have a certain amount of characteristics of ADHD before you can have that label officially applied to you. I think that what an awful lot of people have done is that they've done some sort of test on the internet you know the TikTok test and they have decided that they have ADHD. I also think that there are a lot of women who haven't had their autistic or hyperactivity you know symptoms taken seriously and recognised in the past, and so I think there's an overlap, isn't there, of a social contagion. Everybody wants a label and people being more aware of that label and those who genuinely have that condition I don't like to call it a disorder Going and seeking out a diagnosis and seeking out some clarity and some understanding.
Speaker 2:And is it true to say that women are better at hiding behaviours such as being on the autistic spectrum or ADHD? Are they better at disguising what that might be?
Speaker 3:I think that women are socialised in a different way and I think that, as a very are socialized in a different way, and I think that as a very, very general rule of thumb it's very general rule of thumb I think that they do try to mask symptoms or traits and I think that they overly try to please people as well. So, for example, I've got a friend who was diagnosed with ADHD and it made perfect sense knowing her, and what I wasn't aware of is that every now and again she would have what they call, you know, stims, so she would feel the need to jump up and down or flick her fingers about, and she would go away from other people to do that, because she realised that this is not socially acceptable, although it hurts nobody, and so she would hide that. And I do think that there's a lot of that.
Speaker 2:Interesting, interesting. So let's kind of shift back to what we initially said we might talk about is, which is a subject I know we're both passionate about and we've both spent quite a lot of time working in, and you can broadly call it kind of unwanted attention, yes, but um, what we're talking about is the subjects of stalking and harassment. Yeah, so I guess the first question is how do you define the difference between stalking and harassment?
Speaker 3:Oh gosh, you know I've spent quite a long time talking in a meeting with the other trustees of the Susie Lamplew Trust about this, because it's always a difficult one. Of course there is overlap between stalking and harassment. For me, I would say that harassment is less fixated and obsessional, so it doesn't have that at its core so much. And I think that harassers generally tend to be content with sending communications either to their target or to other people about their target, whereas stalkers, because they do have this obsession at their core, are more likely to feel the need to gather information about people, and it's not necessarily information that they need. So, for example, if somebody is harassing you and they need your address to send you a communication, then that is information that they need in order to carry out their goal.
Speaker 3:But stalkers will just cling on to any piece of information that they can about a person, because any information seems to be relevant information to them, because they because of the level of obsession that they have, and also I think that stalkers tend to seek some form of proximity to a victim, eventually some sort of contact with a victim, and I think the stalkers by and large and again this is very broad brush and again, this is just this is very broad brush cause more distress to their victims and more of a fear about their physical safety. And of course, I understand that harassers do that as well with their communications, because communications can be designed to make people feel fearful. But I think that stalkers does something a bit more ooh, I don't know how to put it into this just hairs on the back of the neck scale goes up a little bit more with stalking.
Speaker 2:How do we explain that? Within the concept of there being different types of stalkers, so they have different agendas but ultimately they are achieving the same thing?
Speaker 3:I think that what stalkers and harassers want is to feel that they are relevant to somebody when quite often they are totally irrelevant to that person. Now in the UK we tend to say that there are five different types of stalker. Now this is simplifying things hugely. I think that it's useful information for the general public to have, but for me, as a doesn't, it just does not cover the spectrum of stalking motivations at all. But nevertheless, so we've got the rejected stalker, and this is somebody who has had a relationship, an intimate relationship, with their victim, an end, and they are trying to build their own self-esteem and defend against those feelings of loss which can seem catastrophic to some people or it can seem like a threat to their masculinity the majority are men when a woman rejects them, and so quite often they want to reconcile with their victim. But when they continue to be rejected, that can turn to anger and they tend to be the type of stalkers that make the most threats. But they're also the type of stalkers who are most likely to act on threats. So high risk of violence with the rejected stalker and of course that links into domestic homicides. So see that depressingly, depressingly often. Then we've got the intimacy seeking or erotomanic stalker. So this is somebody who really believes that a relationship exists between them and their victim, even though the victim might be a total stranger to them or might be somebody who is just an acquaintance. So there's delusional thinking underlying the intimacy-seeking stalker. The intimacy-seeking stalker they don't tend to be particularly risky in terms of violence, although you do have to watch out for intimacy-seeking stalkers going after people who they believe stand in their way. So, for example, I worked with a man who was convinced that a woman that he'd spoken to maybe twice was madly in love with him and her partner was preventing her from having a relationship with him. So he targeted the partner. But, generally speaking, pretty low risk of violence with that particular type.
Speaker 3:There's the incompetent suitor, the third type. So this is somebody who is trying to establish a relationship with somebody and, to be honest, they tend to be fairly fickle. They do tend to move on when they are rejected enough times. Having said that, you have to be careful that they don't then become the rejected stalker, because there's movement between these boxes, as we say. Nobody fits neatly into a box and I'm always very keen to assess whether somebody has switched types, because that, to me indicates a change in thinking, and it's that change in thinking which is really really informative in terms of risk assessment and management. So, the incompetence suitor so we probably all met them, maybe we've been them at some point or another. I'm quite sure I've sent a Valentine's card to somebody that wasn't interested, but hopefully I didn't then pursue it over time.
Speaker 3:And the next one is the resentful stalker. Right, where am I up to? I've got four so far. Yeah, resentful stalker. So this is somebody who is acting on a perceived or real maybe a little bit of both sense of grievance or injustice, and they tend to be pretty unrelenting in their pursuit of having their victim either acknowledge what the stalker feels they have done to wrong them or in trying to seek some sort of recompense. And so you know, the target of this kind of stalking could be anybody, and quite often it's, you know, ex-employees who are stalking corporate figures.
Speaker 3:And then the least common type of stalker but one that I've worked with quite extensively, is the predatory stalker is the predatory stalker, and this is somebody for whom stalking is just one step on the ladder towards offending. They stalk with the intent to carry out a violent or a sexual assault. So, for example, think maybe of Levi Belfield, a name that most people know, who would drive around following buses to see what young girls would get off buses and where they would go with the intent of following one and either violently assaulting her or raping her. So they're the five types of stalker that we talk about in the UK. But, as I say, I think that this as a simple system, as a way to communicate the motivations for stalking to the general public, I think is fine, but for me, of course, it doesn't cut it at all because it doesn't really cover things like stalking of political figures, public figures, celebrity stalking, stalking of political figures, public figures, celebrity stalking.
Speaker 3:And if we look at celebrity stalking as a whole, they're not all intimacy seeking or erotomanic celebrity stalkers. They all don't believe that they're in a relationship with the celebrities that they pursue. They might believe all manner of things, you know, that might be really quite, quite bizarre. They might believe that the celebrity has a doppelganger who is teasing them. You know, all of these things come up. So I think that it is about understanding the individual's motivation and I think for each one of these five categories you could then break it down further. Probably. You could probably find five types under each five categories. So I don't get too hung up on motivational types. They're just the psychological models that that we have to work with and we have to to reference. But, as I say, psychological models are there to be mixed with other psychological models or adapted to your needs.
Speaker 2:You touched on predatory stalkers and we worked on the documentary around one of those individuals. Yes, but it appears that the anomaly there is that there isn't necessarily contact between the two parties and therefore the predatory stalker can often be stalking and no one knows about it.
Speaker 3:This is it, and it can go on for years. So we worked on the stalking of Holly Willoughby although she doesn't like to think of it as stalking, so I'm going to point that out. But certainly there was a plot to kidnap holly willoughby and assault her, and most of it was going on in the imagination of the perpetrator, whose name I forget. I don't know whether you remember his name I remember what it is.
Speaker 3:Now I could, I can look it up quickly I'm always, I'm always more concerned about the name of the victim anyway than the offender I'm like you carry.
Speaker 3:I never like to name these people yeah, I prefer not to um, but he was.
Speaker 3:He was sitting at home, he was very obese and actually found it very difficult to leave his home because of poor health related to his obesity, as you know.
Speaker 3:But he was attempting to engage other men that he would meet over the internet in assisting him and it would appear that if these other men were willing to engage with him and most would engage with him up to a certain point and then go oh sorry, I thought this was fantasy and then back away.
Speaker 3:I think there was one particular individual who who engaged and seemed that he was potentially up for this plot but then was arrested, happily for for another offence. And yeah, it was a really strange one because this was happening mostly in the imagination of this of this particular guy and it really would have been dependent on who he was able to access over the internet. But the scary thing is that the internet gives you access to people all over the world and he might have met that one or two other interested parties who were willing to come and actually enact this plot that he had he had started to to put together and put together in some detail and, of course, the other side of it is that he might, by the way in which he communicated quite detailed plans, he might have allowed other people to attack without his knowledge.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, absolutely. They might have thought well, he's the weak link, because, let's face it, he can barely, you know, in his imagination he was scaling walls and doing all sorts, but in reality he could barely walk to his front door without being out of breath. So it might well have been the case that somebody else looked at the information that he had, and he had detailed information about Holly's movements and her home.
Speaker 2:So, aside from the predatory one, who we agree that there may not always be indications that they're stalking. How, as a victim or a target of stalking, how do you know if you're being stalked? What are you looking for?
Speaker 3:Well, I have to say that I was being stalked for a good, I think, two or three years, before I became aware of it, and I don't think that this is uncommon, it really isn't. I think that you are aware that you are being stalked. If somebody has made themselves known to you and for is the behavior fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repeated Now I would add to that also intimidating and frightening Then you know that you are being stalked. But quite often I think that women in particular think oh well, this will blow over, this will blow over. This is actually not uncommon behavior for men, but it absolutely is uncommon and unacceptable behavior for men.
Speaker 3:And I think that as a society we've romanticized stalking in a way. I think that if you watch any rom-com where you've got somebody who's been rebuffed but yet they continue to try and impose themselves on somebody until eventually that person relents and goes oh yes, yes, I love you. It's viewed as romantic to not take no for an answer and actually there's absolutely nothing romantic about that at all. So I think that the romanticisation, I think, of unacceptable behaviours I know there was a big fuss, wasn't there, about Twilight, the fact that Edward the vampire would, unbeknownst to Bella come and watch her sleep, which is damn creepy yeah yeah, or even to ruin a classic which I absolutely love, um beauty and the beast.
Speaker 3:The beast locks up beauty in his tower but then eventually he he romances her over some library books and some dancing and and she falls madly in love with him. So I think that's part and parcel of the problem of people not realising women in particular, not realising that they're being stalked.
Speaker 2:And I guess that then feeds into the perception by some men that it's okay to do that because this is the end. The end result actually is a positive one She'll fall in love with me or something, because that's what happens on TV.
Speaker 3:Exactly, yeah, and it's romantic, and I'm not doing anything wrong because I've only dropped off some flowers and some chocolates. I've only looked at her Facebook a few times. Yeah, you know, I might have looked at her friends, I might have seen where she was going at night because I might want to show up there. But you know who hasn't.
Speaker 2:No, I'm done, yeah, so you know. What do we do then as a society? As a woman, what would you say you're doing to stop yourself being a victim of stalking?
Speaker 3:I don't think the onus should be on me to stop myself from being a victim of stalking.
Speaker 2:I absolutely agree with you and I think this is a common theme around the victim often women shouldn't have to do anything. Yeah, but in real terms.
Speaker 3:When you are being stalked, you're often told that you've got to collect your own evidence. That's part and parcel of it. And you think, well, for what other crime would you ever be told that you've got to collect your own evidence? That's part and parcel of it. And you think, well, for what other crime would you ever be told that you've got to collect your own evidence? But I think, of course, there are sensible measures that you can take, and I think that those sensible measures just allow you to feel safe, and something that a stalker takes from you is that feeling of safety, and so to take that back and actually feel that you are safe in your own home is a powerful thing to do. So I do. You know the typical things.
Speaker 3:So I don't necessarily put pictures of where I'm going on social media. I don't tend to advertise. Unless it's a public event, I don't advertise where I'm going, and quite often I will post where I've been 24 hours after I've been there. Of course, that's not always possible. You can see a little bit of my background here, but I don't tend to show the front of my house or anything that is beyond this little back scape of my home online, although I know that it's very easy for people to find out where you live and find out the plan of your, your home, et cetera, et cetera. There are various bits of technology you can use to help you to notify people where you are if you want to live that way. But yeah, ultimately the owner shouldn't be on victims, and I think certainly what we need is we need more resources for people who find themselves becoming obsessed with others, where they can go and get support to stop it.
Speaker 2:Do you think they would, though? Do you think they would recognise that they are obsessing and therefore they would go and seek those?
Speaker 3:Not all of them, no, but I think certainly some of them. There are some services and there are services for people who are thinking of sexually offending so called stop it now respect, and actually they do get an awful lot of people who who contact them and we have to make those services available. But also I think that we have to clearly indicate what is acceptable and not acceptable as a society. I'm not saying that we need to ban beauty and the beast, but certainly I think we need to have the right conversations around these things with children from an early age and then moving forward.
Speaker 2:With respect to risk assessments, which is a hot topic at the moment. A very hot topic at the moment Because we've both and we've had a little chat about it previously, but there's a particular risk assessment. In fact, there's two risk assessments, but the DASH risk assessment, which is primarily a domestic abuse screening.
Speaker 3:It is, and it was conceptually flawed from the beginning, because how do you put a risk assessment together that is meant to cover domestic abuse, stalking and honour-based abuse?
Speaker 2:So it was meant to be a quick and dirty assessment for everything, which, for me, I think, would always have been doomed to to failure so I've been talking about this for years with various people you know, yeah, very often psychologists and the universal view has been it's a very poor risk assessment. Why has it taken so long for that to be kind of academically acknowledged or publicly acknowledged?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that any risk assessment, what generally happens is that it is very, very heavily researched before it goes out on the market and it is used. So there's years goes into researching the tool and then if it's found to have some sort of predictive validity, then we start to use it. And of course the way we use it is significant, because untrained people using a risk assessment is never very helpful. But this one, the research doesn't seem to have happened before it went on the market, it's happened afterwards. So now we're getting good scientific studies that say do you know what? You can use the dash or you can flip a coin. You're just as likely to have the right answer. And so it wasn't that the science that needed to go into.
Speaker 2:It didn't happen upfront, and yet, for some reason, it's been widely used by police services across the UK and elsewhere.
Speaker 3:I think that there was, there was. People want simple solutions to complex problems. So, oh, here's a quick and dirty assessment that we can do, and we can ask questions ask questions of victims, by the way. So including questions like does the person who might have just assaulted you because they tend to be domestic abuse victims you know a? Do they have a criminal record? Well, isn't it the job of the police officers to to find that, not ask the victim, them who may or may or not know? Um, and yeah, there's, there's a, there's a want for, for simple answers to complex problems. That simply doesn't exist, and I also think that it was very heavily pushed by the people that created it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And why wouldn't it be? You know it's a good business for them, but I think it lacked that scientific rigour.
Speaker 2:So what's happening then? Is there a new assessment being promoted now in policing?
Speaker 3:At the moment they are saying that the preference is to use the DARA, but we badly need risk assessments that are specific for stalking victims and are specific for those who have been subjected to honour abuse. And also what we need is we need really good training of police and frontline workers in what stalking is, what domestic abuse is, what coercive control is and, yes, they're all overlapping but to understand the differences and to actually know which risk assessments to go to when confronted with what cases. I mean, it's not the DASH's fault that police have been tasked to use the DASH risk assessment and they've not been trained and they've got no knowledge in risk assessment, so they're doing it really very badly.
Speaker 2:I think it also particularly with stalking. The legislation is poor and confusing it is. It doesn't define what stalking is.
Speaker 3:It just keeps talking about harassment um yeah, and it's being, it's being re-looked at again. That was another meeting with the suzy lamplugh trust, or possibly the same meeting, when we were discussing the differences between harassment and stalking, and so a lot of work is going into that. I don't think that the definitions are ever going to be they're never going to be ideal. You just try and capture as much as you can. With something like stalking, the behaviors are so varied, aren't they?
Speaker 3:they really are yeah but what I think it's about is about understanding patterns of behavior, and that's where I think that, through no fault of their own, please do fall down, and that's because they're not educated and encouraged to think about patterns of behaviour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had someone else describe it as clusters of behaviour in terms of the stars, etc. And also changing behaviours.
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly so, that change in thinking. So something that I often look at. If I'm doing a risk assessment or have been doing a risk assessment for somebody who is in a domestic abuse situation, for a start I want to talk to everybody concerned. So I want to talk to the perpetrator and I want to understand in any way that I can whether it's looking at communications that they've had with the victim or talking to them more directly. I want to understand what is going on in their mind and I'm often looking for trigger events, changes in circumstances and changes in thinking, particularly if that thinking has become very depressed, you know, depressed, nihilistic, you know if somebody's talking about suicide or the end of days, that kind of thing and so what.
Speaker 3:I tend to go to as much as I will go to risk assessment tools that I've got, and I would never rely on just one risk assessment tool. You've got to have quite a few tools in your toolbox. But I would also go to the domestic homicide timeline, because that is not a risk assessment tool but it's about recognising the patterns and the escalations and the micro escalations that lead to a domestic homicide. So I think that is a really useful structure the DASH and other risk assessment tools are only really meant to be a structure to your clinical judgment. So it's not turn your brain off and tick a list and then do a little bit of adding up and see where you get to. You're meant to actually engage your own mind and your own professional curiosity.
Speaker 2:And, of course, everything is context-based as well. Absolutely yeah. So that's a critical element of yeah, context is king, yeah, and, as you say too often, it's a tick-the-box exercise.
Speaker 3:And that's what unfortunately unfortunately has happened with the dash. It has become a tick box exercise and some police officers do it better than others. I know there are some people who work in support services with domestic abuse victims and they do the dash reasonably well, but as a risk assessment tool if you've got no predictive validity, you know yeah, yeah yeah, you've failed it is, isn't it, and it's it's.
Speaker 2:It's a complex subject. Do you think we're seeing more unwanted attention now, or is it just becoming more talked about?
Speaker 3:I don't know, because we've actually. Yes, I think we are seeing more unwanted attention now, and I think that part of that is we're living in very angry times, aren't we? And very divided times, so I think the public figures, political figures, are getting more and more unwanted attention. I think that women have always had unwanted attention. I think that now there are more ways to intrude upon people. You know, there's technology out there that assists stalkers no end, that nobody seems to be too concerned about, and also, people give away so much of their own personal information. That has become our culture now. The culture now is that you know, if you are a celebrity, you've got to be on Instagram and you've got to photograph yourself, photograph every meal that you have, you know, photograph your friends, photograph your home, and so, yeah, I definitely think that the culture has shifted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think younger people have a very different relationship with the internet than perhaps you or I do, and they probably feel safer there than you or I do. And there is this whole kind of influencer lifestyle where we overshare.
Speaker 3:Oh, massive oversharing, massive oversharing. Well, it's become a commodity now, isn't it what you can share?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but also I think there are lots of processes which we're required to undertake in our daily business where we're required to give away information, sometimes to government departments, whether it's, you know, voters, registrars, all sorts of different things and too often that material is made available, or is available without too much difficulty, to people who shouldn't have access to that information.
Speaker 3:Really Even with good GDPR.
Speaker 2:Oh God, yeah, I mean you know you look at. A classic one would be you sell your house and it goes on Rightmove or the estate agency when you've sold your house it's still there. It's still there and the plans of your house are still there and if you try and engage with them to try and get that material removed, it's almost impossible.
Speaker 3:Yes, I'm with a company called Delete Me, but how much deleting gets done I really don't know. And this was one of the things. When I was being stalked, my stalker wrote on the internet well, of course, I've got Kerry Danes' address. It's easy to get a hold of and I'm quite sure that he must have had a look around the house that I was living in Because, as you say, you only had to go on to Rightmove to have a look, so you can literally look into people's. You can see what colour duvet somebody sleeps underneath, which to most of us won't be remotely interesting, but to a stalker is very valuable not required, but valued information very valuable not required, but valued information.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then when I, as a stalker, say to you oh, I loved your blue duvet last night.
Speaker 3:Exactly how frightening is that?
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. So the fact they haven't seen it last night is neither here nor there, but the fact they can use that information to infer they have a greater knowledge of your lifestyle than they have. Yes. And again there are other environments where we're having to give out our addresses where we shouldn't do. Local authorities again you apply for an extension of your home or something. You have to submit the plans and everything. Very often those plans remain on their databases. You don't need to be having that out there.
Speaker 3:No, you don't. And for the person, who doesn't necessarily represent a risk of violence, which is what we're always concerned about I know I've had many sleepless nights wondering whether I was going to be murdered in my bed or not. Just the potential for causing distress and fear is huge, isn't it? Can we just touch?
Speaker 2:before we finish, can we touch on the concept around which I'm very conscious of, of the emotions that you go through when you are being targeted, and particularly around things like paranoia and hypervigilance?
Speaker 3:Yes, because I think that what, possibly one of the things that differentiates a stalker from a harasser but certainly something is it's the only presence in your life. That's the only way that I can put it. So, for example, I didn't feel safe going outside of my house because I didn't know who my stalker was. So potentially every, every male that I saw was my stalker, but equally, I didn't feel safe in my own home. So, if you don't feel safe inside or outside, the only place I felt safe was at work, which was ironic really, and I was surrounded by predatory stalkers there. So it's that omnipresence and that very heavy feeling of you don't know what's coming next. You don't know what's going on that you're not aware of, because you're aware that you're only, you've only got the top part of the iceberg to work with, and I was busy doing my own risk assessments and even though I was trying to say to myself, well, hang on a minute, I don't think this is, this is not the highest. You know we're not talking about a rejected stalker. There's always that very small question, but it's actually a very big question. It's the what if question, but it's actually a very big question. It's the what if, what if? Um.
Speaker 3:So I think that those, those feelings, are so oppressive, and it's the challenge is to try and go about your, your everyday life without feeling afraid.
Speaker 3:Actually, most stalking victims will shrink their life, and I did that for a while. So you don't go to public places, or I stopped doing as many public engagements speaking engagements, for example because I just didn't want to give the stalker the opportunity to be in the audience. And so you shrink your life to fit, and it's only really when I had a good word with myself and thought I would not accept this. If I was in a relationship with this individual, which I'm absolutely there wasn't and there's no chance of that, I would not accept this. So why am I accepting this from some bloody nobody? So I think that one of the real challenges is for people who are being stalked or being harassed uh, regardless of what the, the real risk is is for them to feel safety. So and and be operating in a place of psychological safety, and that's that's a difficult thing to achieve, but I think that's the the key to regaining your life.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the big challenges of that is that, to those who don't understand, that's what goes on in someone's brain and their mind and their emotions written off as being overly concerned and becoming hysterical, obsessive, you know all these sort of things. And that then leads to the uneducated to not necessarily believe what they're saying, because they're being you know, inverted commas a drama queen or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And actually that's one of the critical factors and I deal with it quite a lot with our clients around. Yeah, they're feeling that way because that's what happens when you're targeted. So you know, if they're reporting stuff that doesn't make sense or isn't happening or that's their perception, that's because they don't feel safe.
Speaker 3:So we need to understand that rather than ignore it yeah, absolutely, and we don't need to be engaging in gaslighting with people. So I was very nearly run over by somebody several years after. I thought my stalker was dealt with and I looked into the car and I thought, hang on a minute, I think that's him. But I'd only seen him seen the back of his head in court, you know on one or two occasions. That was it. And everybody that I spoke to said oh, you're being paranoid, you've not heard from him for a long time. Within a week I'd had a letter from him. So I was quite convinced that I was right. So it is. It's about. It's a delicate balance, isn't it really About trying to feel safe so that you can go on about your life, but actually trusting your own instinct and knowing what you should be reporting. I mean, one of the biggest things I will kick myself forever about is the fact that I wrote down that person's license number and then threw it away because people convinced me that I was being a drama queen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, Difficult, difficult. Listen, Kerry, thank you so much for your time today. It's been, as always, wonderful chatting with you and to gain your expertise and insights into what is a complex subject but a really important one.
Speaker 3:It is a really important one, and one that affects many, many people today, so certainly something that we need to tackle and get a firmer grip of, and hopefully we will as we move forward.
Speaker 2:There's much to be done, much to be done and, thanks to experts like yourself, we're heading in the right direction, I hope.
Speaker 3:I hope so too Well.
Speaker 2:thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Fascinating discussion there with the wonderful Kerry Gaines, who will share all the details on the notes around, where you can get hold of her, where you can communicate with her what her books are, because they're fantastic books. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please remember to subscribe. Subscribe also to Diffuse News, our weekly newsletter, which covers this subject, and many, many more. Make sure that you have a copy of the book that we've written, which is available via Amazon, and if there's anything else we can do for you here at Diffuse, please don't hesitate to get in contact. Thank you once again for listening.
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