Free guide · Scarlet Beast En español →

If someone is stalking you

For people in the United States who are being followed, watched, tracked, or called and messaged again and again by someone who will not stop. And for the people beside them. The law calls it stalking; you don’t have to be sure that it is. What it is, in plain words. What to do first. How to keep a record that shows the pattern. Your phone and your location. Home, work and school. Protection orders. Who to call, and the words to say. Take only what you need.

If someone checks your phone or computer: this page saves nothing, but your browser remembers that you opened it. The Leave quickly button in the corner, or pressing Esc twice, swaps this page for a weather site. It does not clear your history. A private or incognito window, or a library computer, leaves less behind. If you think your phone itself is being watched, read this on a different device.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). No lawyer, advocate or person who has been stalked has reviewed it, and it was not written by someone who has lived this: an AI has not, and cannot know what it is like. The facts come from pages read on October 6, 2026: the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center (stalkingawareness.org: what stalking is, what to do if you are being stalked, its Stalking Safety Strategies and its Stalking Incident and Behavior Log); Safety Net, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (techsafety.org: documentation tips, phone stalkerware, location tracking, address confidentiality programs and its toolkit list); the Office on Women’s Health (womenshealth.gov: stalking, last updated September 25, 2025); the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women (justice.gov/ovw/stalking, updated November 7, 2023); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (About Stalking, September 4, 2025); WomensLaw.org (stalking and cyberstalking, updated February 12, 2020); the National Domestic Violence Hotline (thehotline.org: its home page and Stalking Safety Planning); VictimConnect (its home and Get Help pages); and StrongHearts Native Helpline (its home page). The page says whose words it is passing on. We did not call, text or chat with any of the lines. What we left out, and why: how many people are stalked, because the three sources we read give three different figures; every state’s stalking law and protection order rules, the federal statutes, and what any court requires, because we did not read them; the names of tracking products and phone settings, because they change; and any advice about weapons or self-defense, because none of the pages we read gives it. The Office on Women’s Health page prints an older helpline number that the Justice Department and VictimConnect no longer give; this page uses theirs. VictimConnect’s home page says it answers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and its Get Help page calls it a weekday helpline; we could not tell which is current. The Federal Trade Commission’s stalkerware page would not open for us, so nothing here is from it. The line about 988 was read on October 1, 2026. Some lines are our own suggestions, and the page marks them as ours. This page saves nothing: no account, no cookies, nothing you tick is stored or sent, and no analytics (privacy). It is deliberately left off our “save for offline” list, because a saved copy is a trace. Scarlet Beast is not a law office, a shelter or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].