The Levison Wood Stalking Case: Justice for some, but not for all
Image by Khusen Rustamov at Pixabay
Fiza Jabeen, a 36-year-old woman from Birmingham, was sentenced to 13 months in prison this week after being convicted of harassing and stalking the explorer and television presenter Levison Wood.
Her campaign of terror against Mr Wood was chilling. In April, she began sending him explicit messages via Instagram and Twitter. She engaged in proxy stalking[i], contacting his friends, family and ex-partner. She threatened his parents. She was made subject to a restraining order in June, which she ignored. Her behaviour escalated, culminating in a carefully engineered face-to-face interaction with Mr Wood in July whilst he was walking his dog in a local park near to his Richmond home. She had found out where he lived through searching for details of his company online. She suggested going to his house for a cup of tea and asked if she could use his internet. Mr Wood was understandably alarmed and terrified by this turn of events. Jabeen was taken into custody after this incident and later admitted stalking and harassment. Mr Wood put his house up for sale and remains fearful for his and his family’s safety.
Mr Wood is right to be afraid. Jabeen is a type of stalker known as an intimacy seeker[ii]. These stalkers, who are often seen in cases of ‘celebrity stalking’, have convinced themselves that they and their target are destined to be together or are already ‘in love’. They will continue to contact their target despite being rebuffed or rejected – they are wholly indifferent to or unaffected by these negative responses. Any kind of attention from their target is desirable – whether that attention is positive or negative. They deify their target, they are the ideal and only partner for them. They are certain that their actions will result in a romantic relationship and cannot entertain any other outcome.
Intimacy seeking stalkers are fantasists, often having never experienced genuine intimacy and attachment to other people. That seems to be the case with Jabeen. Whilst her status as a doctor and former job as a paediatraican at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital demonstrates considerable professional competence, she has the emotional maturity of a teenager. She was raised in a devout religious household and has little – if any – experience of close relationships with men outside of her family. I also suspect that she was lacking in close friends, especially those who act as a check on our behaviour and call us out when we’re acting inappropriately. Her obsession with Mr Wood is a substitute, a solution to the isolated nature of a life wholly lacking in intimacy. Her fixation with Mr Wood has become integral to her sense of identity as an individual. This became particularly significant when she gave up her job in late 2019 to care for her terminally ill mother, who died in March this year. She knows exactly what she’s doing and she knows that it is wrong. Despite this, she’s not going to give Mr Wood up easily. Her obsession with him is all consuming and defining, it is who she is. Intimacy seekers like her are incredibly persistent, their stalking campaigns can last for years or even decades.
Prison is unlikely to curtail her sense of entitlement to Mr Wood. Intimacy seekers are not deterred by legal penalties. Restraining orders aren’t seen as the wake-up calls they should be, prompting the realisation that this kind of conduct is far from okay. Instead, they are interpreted as challenges to be overcome, obstacles to be tackled in their quest for everlasting love. A prison sentence isn’t viewed as a punishment, it’s seen as the ultimate test of devotion and commitment. Jabeen’s time inside is likely to result in an intensification of her obsession with Mr Wood. This won’t put the brakes on her behaviour, it will incubate the fixation.
Although I suspect the beginning of Jabeen’s fixation with Mr Wood began long before she started to stalk him, it was only a matter of months between those first obtrusive and menacing messages and her imprisonment. The same cannot be said for other celebrities who have found themselves on the wrong end of an intimacy seeker. The television presenter Christine Lampard and the journalist Emily Maitlis are among many high-profile people who have experienced the horrors of this type of stalker.
Christine Lampard’s stalker pursued her for more than two and half years. He besieged her with menacing Tweets. One said, "hear the scratch of nails as I sharpen them ahead of your crucifixion". Another stated, "I am planning the words that will go on your gravestone”. He sent her letters and turned up at her house more than once. She and her housekeeper hid in a bedroom on one of those occasions, frightened as to what he might do next. But this stalker didn’t go to prison. He received a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years. Emily Maitlis has been stalked by a man she went to university with since the 1990s. It was not until 2016 that he received a prison sentence. And that didn’t stop him. Even from behind bars, he continued his campaign against her through writing letters to her. One letter, sent to her via the BBC, stated “I will not relent until you talk to me.”
What is the difference between Levison Wood’s case the cases of Christine Lampard Emily Maitlis? Some would say that all cases are unique, each must be judged on their merits and that sentencing depends on a complex and specific range of factors. This is of course true but the key difference is the sex of the victims. Mr Wood is a man with a female stalker. Christine Lampard and Emily Maitlis are women with male stalkers. Justice has been swift in Mr Wood’s case and his stalker was quickly imprisoned, serving time on remand prior to her conviction. The stalkers of Christine Lampard and Emily Maitlis did not receive the same rapid or severe consequences for their actions. They strolled into court, they often strolled right back out again.
Why was the type of justice Levison Wood received not forthcoming for Christine Lampard and Emily Maitlis? Because when it comes to stalking, gendered expectations of men and women lurk in the background, influencing the outcome of the criminal justice process. Judges are not sentencing the act or the behaviour, they are sentencing the degree to which the offender’s behaviour deviates from ‘traditional’ expectations of who men and women are and how they should behave.
The assumption that men are the aggressors, the pursuers, driven by ‘natural’ drives to secure an intimate relationship serves to deny their responsibility for their actions when they stalk women. They are often described as love-struck, devoted and heartbroken. Poor helpless creatures at the mercy of their biology. Women on the other hand should be passive, demure and unassuming. To chase a man is to defy traditional femininity. It’s seen as a masculine behaviour, an unseemly way to conduct oneself. These assumptions are ingrained. Women should play hard to get, not appear ‘easy’ or ‘too keen’. When a woman stalks, she’s not only breaking the law but she’s transgressing the boundaries of acceptable femininity.
I think it is right that Levison Wood’s stalker has gone to prison. Even if the legal penalty is unlikely to curtail Jabeen’s obsession with him it sends out an important message that stalking is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. However, stalking should be as unacceptable for men as it is for women. We must start challenging the stubborn and persistent gendering within our criminal justice system. Only then will we begin to see justice for all victims of stalking, whatever their sex.
[i] Melton, H. C. (2007). Stalking in the context of intimate partner abuse: In the victims’ words. Feminist Criminology, 2(4), 347–363.
[ii] Mullen, Pathe and Purcell. (2000). Stalkers and their victims. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
