James Steele case: Predatory stalkers play a psychological game of power and control

From the very first unwanted embrace of the victim to ultimately attempting to break in to her house fully prepared with rope, duct tape and a prosthetic penis, James Steele was exerting control over the victim, insidiously and coercively

Sat, 06 Feb, 2021 - 06:30

Ciara Staunton

On Thursday, a man was sentenced to seven years in prison, with the last two years suspended, at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

This newspaper described 52-year-old James Steele as having become obsessed with a woman and went on to harass and threaten to rape her.

In fact, he was arrested as he was attempting to break into the woman’s home, fully armed with what can only be described as a rape kit. What this woman endured can be described as nothing short of a nightmare.

Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin described the crime as dramatic and horrific and that it went significantly beyond a case of harassment. He is correct on that point. Make no doubt about it, this is a crime of stalking.

We tend to connect stalkers with celebrity personalities but stalking is a crime that involves acts of pursuit of an individual over time that are threatening and potentially dangerous. In this particular case, very dangerous indeed.

Reading the sordid details of the case, it would be all too easy to write James Steele off as some kind of sick weirdo. This is the kind of language I usually encounter from students who take my courses in UCC – they want to understand such “sick weirdos”.

However, such descriptions and reductionist approaches to potential underlying mental health issues completely undermine the dangerousness posed by stalkers. In fact, only a small proportion of stalkers receive a diagnosis of mental illness. Some stalkers may be more of a nuisance than a menace, but others can pose a very real risk to their victims.

James Steele was arrested as he was attempting to break into the woman’s home, fully armed with what can only be described as a rape kit. Picture: Cork Courts Limited

I would describe James Steele as a predatory stalker. We fear violence that appears random, senseless and unpredictable. And while at one level it may appear that stalkers choose victims at random, nothing could be further from the truth. Ultimately, this is a psychological game of power and control.

There is a clear escalation in the behaviours of James Steele from the very first unwanted embrace of the victim to the leaving of black envelopes with letters on the windscreen of the victim’s car to the painting her car tyres pink to ultimately progressing to night-time visits to the victim’s house and finally attempting to break in fully prepared with rope, duct tape and a prosthetic penis.

Nothing needs to be left to the imagination here. With each and every one of these subsequent events, James Steele was exerting control over the victim, insidiously and coercively.

The sheer fear and terror the stalker’s actions induce in the victim fuel his sense of power and pleasure while simultaneously reinforcing his sense of entitlement.

This will have resulted in an enrichment and fuelling of his fantasies around what he would do to the victim next, as will no doubt be borne out in the details of the threatening letters.

While the fantasies can sustain the stalker for a period of time, like a drug, they will inevitably need more and more to meet the psychological demand. This will result in the behaviours becoming both more frequent, bizarre and brazen, to the point at which they are ready to carry out a physical attack.

This kind of behavioural escalation takes a long time! It is fuelled first and foremost by obsessive thoughts. In a clinical sense, obsessions are more than strong desires. They are entrenched cognitive distortions which develop into fixations – a persistent focus on the object of desire.

Each incident is thought about and practised in the stalker’s imagination over and over again. Stalking behaviours don’t develop overnight. They will have been present in the stalker’s enriched fantasy life for a very long time. All the stalker ultimately needs is opportunity.

Behaviours that may start out as nuisance can quickly escalate as the stalker reinforces his own sense of power and prowess, like a hunter. From a psychological perspective, recognising the force of fantasy as a central component of intense emotion and inexplicable behaviour is the first step in understanding the psychology of stalking.

Most revealing is the fact that James Steele has a previous fine for indecent assault in 1986 from Australia. This highlights that the potential and propensity for violence was already present. So victims are not random, they are simply unfortunate due to circumstance. How many other incidences will have been attempted that were simply never reported? Most likely there were.

Good police work by An Garda Síochána is what ultimately caught James Steele. Research from other countries indicates that stalking is a substantial criminal justice and public health concern. The difficulty from a policing perspective is determining the point at which nuisance attention passes over into threatening behaviour.

Let’s be in no doubt about the long-lasting psychological impact this crime has on victims. I was relieved to read that the victim in this case is seeing a psychotherapist and has made statements to the fact that she will get over and move on from this. Let’s hope she does.