All stalking campaigns start with and are sustained by one or more grievances. The Oxford Dictionary (1934 edition in this instance: waste not, want not) defines a grievance as "Real or fancied ground of complaint." The Oxford Academics of the 1930s chose those six words with great precision: a grievance is as likely to be imaginary or falsified as it is to be true. An understanding of this fact might allow a lot of apparently motiveless crimes to be solved: people hate, and harm, other people, not only for things which the other people never did, but for things that never even happened in the first place. And yet, the decisive question which policemen ask stalking victims is almost always "what have you done to make them do this to you?" This question tends to be decisive in getting an investigation dropped or, more usually, not started in the first place.
If a stalking victim admits they do not know of any reason, then the police tend to drop the investigation there and then because it's clear to them that it's not happening. (Unless the victim is female and attractive, in which case they will assume it's sexually-based and it might not be.)
If the victim is inspired to make a guess, then the police might investigate on the basis of that guess until it's proved wrong, from which point on the victim is regarded as a delusional nuisance, never to be listened to again.
With vocational stalkers (and "professional" ones, who do it on behalf of others for money do exist as this is less risky than hiring a killer) the victim will almost certainly have been fed disinformation which inspires them to not only put forward a false reason for the stalking, but also to completely misidentify the stalker(s).
The same applies in murder cases, too: the only difference is that the victim isn't even able to argue with the police when they can't find any motive, or, by getting the motive wrong, identify the wrong suspect. You are never going to uncover a baseless grievance by a close and methodical study of the facts! (For the wrong person to actually get convicted of a murder, the jury only has to buy into the prosecution's concept of either the motive or some other aspect of what took place. Because, although in theory the accused is innocent until proven guilty, the absence of any alternative suspect is often taken as proof of guilt and it really, really should not be.)
But there is a much more fundamental danger with baseless grievances: they do not go away with time. The baseless grievance cannot be settled or resolved: you cannot pay back that which you never stole, you cannot sincerely apologise for an insult or blasphemy which you never uttered. And because no falsely-accused party can "admit the truth" of a baseless grievance, it never gets forgotten either! The most effective form of propaganda is to manufacture synthetic grievances against your enemies: Mr Putin's justification of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was based on numerous baseless grievances, such as Ukraine's Jewish president being an antisemitic NAZI! And this is why there will never be a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia; because Ukraine is required by Russia to right a whole raft of wrongs which never happened.
Mr Andrew Bridgen MP has been totally cancelled and de-platformed for antisemitism because he quoted, verbatim, a report by academics at a Hebrew University. Everyone in Parliament now knows this to be the case, all but about twelve members of Parliament continue to ostracise and vilify Mr Bridgen despite knowing that their basis for doing so is false. Future generations may never know the truth because this generation of MPs and journalists simply won't admit it.
And all of the above has been written simply to illustrate what happens within the families and social circles of stalkers, to make stalking multi-generational in many cases:
When a baseless grievance is used to explain, and justify, what the adults in a family are doing to someone else, and they might well be doing something that goes beyond harassment into persecution and mental torture, children growing up with that grievance (and often seeing what their adult carers are capable of) end up with some very limited choices:
They can challenge what is being done and the basis on which it is being done, in which case they will be bullied into submission or even killed.
They can try to escape, but they may be pursued and brought back out of the need of those who have bought into the baseless grievance to preserve it.
They can fade into the background and go along with it all as much as they need to in order to avoid repercussions.
Or, and in most cases this is what happens: the baseless grievance will be constantly repeated and reiterated in order to lend it force and this has a brainwashing effect, not just on those who hear it, but on those who say it. Add to this the fact that there is no good outcome for anyone in such a family or social circle who appears to disbelieve the baseless grievance and learning to believe the false grievance isn't so much the path of least resistance as the only available path.
Furthermore, whatever the baseless grievance is, it might not be spoken outside of the family or social circle doing the stalking, so the victims (and all outsiders) will be left guessing. And the stalking will go on until either the victims, their descendants or even their entire ethnic group, is gone.
Organised and individual stalking are not crimes against humanity on the same scale or intensity as the ongoing genocide against the Uighurs or the historical genocides against the Armenians and the Jewish Holocaust, which was inspired by the Armenian genocide, but they arise out of and are sustained by the same mechanism: the baseless grievance. And in Rwanda, stalking on the grounds of both inflated and baseless grievances was deliberately used by agents of the French Government to prepare the population to commit actual genocide.
(Interesting point: The French plan for the Rwandan genocide pretty much followed Haman's plot in the book of Esther in the Old Testament. And Haman had no substantial motive for his plot at all, really! The alleged but scarcely believable motive for the Rwandan genocide is that the Tutsis used English as their lingua franca. The motive for both Czarist and Bolshevik repression in Ukraine was that the Ukrainians had their own language. Same story in Kazakhstan and Finland, really.)
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