Every time a stalker turns violent, lawmakers and civic groups reiterate the need to urgently enact legislation to pre-emptively deal with such situations before the next tragedy befalls.
They called for it in 2017 when a student stabbed a classmate whom he had been stalking and harassing for five years. They called for it when a Malaysian student was murdered last year by a man who had a history of stalking women. They called for it last month on International Women’s Day, naming stalking as one of the “three great beasts” that need to be taken down through legislation, along with workplace harassment and revenge porn.
However, little has been done, as the bills are stuck in legal limbo.
Tragedy struck again last week, when a woman surnamed Tseng (曾) was allegedly abducted and killed by a man surnamed Huang (黃).
Tseng had filed multiple police reports earlier this year against Huang for alleged harassment and stalking, but police could not do much under the law.
She could not obtain a restraining order, as those are only allowed for current or former spouses, romantic partners or relatives, and the suspect was let off with a warning.
How much longer will the nation wait while similar incidents pile up?
Only the cases that turn violent make the headlines, but the National Police Agency said it receives about 8,000 stalking reports every year.
The bills that government agencies try to enact continue to disappoint proponents of anti-stalking legislation, and eventually get stuck in the Legislative Yuan due to the scope, definition and number of institutions the issue involves.
The 2018 version was panned for being too specific in defining stalking and giving police too much time to investigate complaints — the point is for the victims to obtain immediate protection so that things do not escalate.
Last year’s version was also heavily criticized. The government apparently fails to understand that the only thing that can help people targeted by stalking is immediate intervention. When perpetrators take more extreme actions that break the law, it is often too late.
Last week’s incident only proves that point — it took merely a few months for Huang’s actions to turn from stalking to alleged murder.
The Judicial Yuan last month expressed concern that it would not be able to handle a large number of restraining orders and hoped that the law would focus more on police intervention.
Meanwhile, police want to narrow the scope of the bill to stalkers who want to pursue a romantic or sexual relationship with their target, saying those are the most common and most likely to turn violent, while proponents want the bill to cover any type of “prolonged and sustained behavior designed to instill fear in a reasonable person.”
This is not the time for lawmakers to shirk their responsibility and further bog down the process.
If the law is powerful enough and can curb stalking, then the workload for police and courts should drop eventually.
It would take time, but that is the only way for real change to happen.
Otherwise, incidents would keep happening and public criticism would only grow, which is not good for either side.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS