영국의 스토킹법 입법연혁이 우리에게 주는 시사점

초록

Stalking is a serious crime that can escalate into much more violent crime that often ends with the murder of the victim and/or her family members. A new law has come into effect in October 2021 that finally recognizes stalking as a crime in Korea and imposes a more substantive penalty against the offender. However, the new law has already come under fire for not providing sufficient protection for the victims, not having effective measures to prevent the offenders from repeat offence, and also requiring the victim’s consent for prosecution of the stalking offence. In the UK where a law to prevent stalking was enacted in 1997 it has been found that the initial statutory provisions were inadequate to prevent stalking nor to protect the victims. The law has been amended a couple of times since then to introduce a newly defined crime of stalking offence as well as to provide better tools for the police to protect the victims including Stalking Protection Orders, a civil order that can be enforced against stalkers. However, criticisms were also being leveled at the UK police force for not being more active in using these tools and measures to provide sufficient protection for the victims. A key ingredient seems to be education and raising awareness of the frontline police force which cannot be achieved through statutory changes alone. These are all very familiar criticisms also present in the recent Korean cases that have resulted in deaths of stalking victims where the police, despite having the opportunity to take the offender into custody earlier, failed to spot the danger signals and did not take seriously enough the victims’ pleas for help and allowed the crimes to take place. The existing method of monitoring the victims’ whereabouts via GPS-tracking watch has proven a useless tool against a determined stalker:better to track the stalker’s movement than the victim’s. In the end, more must be done for the education and training of the police and other law enforcement authorities to raise their awareness of the seriousness of stalking offence and what they must do to ensure victims’ safety better. This paper traces the legislative history of stalking law in the U.K. in order to draw lessons therefrom so that we can provide better protection for victims of stalking and to prevent stalkers from committing violent crimes.

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