Stalking & Intimidation Charges in NSW

What the charge actually requires

Crimes (Domestic and Personal Violence) Act 2007 (NSW), s 13: a person who stalks or intimidates another person with the intention of causing the other person to fear physical or mental harm is guilty of an offence.

The offence has two parts, and both matter. First, the conduct: stalking or intimidation, each defined broadly in the Act. Second — and this is where the defence work usually lives — the intention to cause fear of physical or mental harm.

Intimidation covers harassment or molestation; approaches made by any means (including phone, text, email and other technology) that cause fear for safety; and conduct causing a reasonable apprehension of injury, violence, or damage to property. Stalking covers following a person, watching or frequenting the vicinity of their home, work or places they socialise — and, expressly, contacting or approaching them using the internet or other technologically assisted means.

Three features of the intention element shape every one of these cases:

• You intend to cause fear if you know the conduct is likely to cause it — the Act treats that knowledge as intention;
• The prosecution does not have to prove the person actually feared anything; and
• Causing the person to fear for someone they share a domestic relationship with — a new partner, a child — counts as causing fear to them.

"I never touched anyone, I just sent messages" — why the online conduct counts

The most common surprise in these matters: people assume stalking means following someone down a street, and that messages — however heated — are something less than a criminal allegation. The Act says otherwise, and was amended specifically to say otherwise. Repeated unwanted texts and calls, contact through social media accounts (including new accounts after being blocked), monitoring a former partner's online life, checking their location, turning up where their posts say they will be — all of this is squarely within the definitions of stalking and intimidation.

The digital trail cuts both ways, though. Message threads are the prosecution's evidence, but they are also the context: a thread read in full often shows two-way contact, reconciliation attempts invited by the other side, or messages whose tone is desperate rather than menacing. Whether the conduct was accompanied by an intention to cause fear — or was the unhappy tail-end of a relationship both people kept reopening — is exactly the kind of question that is lost when the police read only the excerpts they are handed.

Penalties and what the charge carries with it

The maximum penalty is 5 years' imprisonment, a $5,500 fine (50 penalty units), or both; the matter is generally dealt with in the Local Court, where the jurisdictional maximum of 2 years applies. Outcomes range from orders without conviction in appropriate cases through fines and community-based orders to imprisonment, with the courts treating persistent, fear-inducing conduct toward former partners as a deterrence priority.

The conviction is rarely the whole of the consequence. A s 13 finding is a personal violence offence: a final AVO almost always follows conviction, police will usually have sought a provisional order at charge, and where an order already existed, the same conduct is commonly charged as both stalking/intimidation and contravention of the AVO. Bail conditions in the meantime frequently exclude you from your own home. These collateral consequences need managing from day one, not after the criminal charge resolves.

Defences and answers to the charge

• No intention to cause fear — the central battleground: contact intended to reconcile, retrieve property, or arrange children's matters is not, without more, intended to cause fear of harm;
• The conduct does not meet the definitions — not every unpleasant exchange is harassment, and a reasonable apprehension of injury requires more than discomfort;
• Context and two-way contact — full message threads, call logs and the other side's own contact often tell a different story from the charge facts;
• Identification — in online allegations, proving who was behind the account or device;
• Reasonable apprehension assessed objectively — the test is not the complainant's subjective reaction alone.

Where the conduct is made out, the work turns to the plea: the relationship's reality, what was actually driving the contact, intervention undertaken since — courses, counselling, strict no-contact discipline — and a subjective case that distinguishes a bad period from a dangerous person.

How Lenz Legal approaches stalking and intimidation charges

These matters almost never arrive alone: there is a charge, an AVO application, bail conditions, often a parallel family law dimension — and a relationship history that the charge facts compress into a paragraph. The approach is to defend the whole position as one strategy: obtain the complete message and call records (not the excerpts), test the intention element against the full context, deal with the AVO proceedings in step with the criminal charge rather than separately, and stabilise the bail and accommodation position immediately.

If you have been charged — or police have contacted you about messages or contact with a former partner — get advice before you are interviewed, and before you send another message of any kind. Continued contact after police involvement is the single most reliable way these matters become worse, and the explanation offered in an interview, without advice, is the second.

Stalking & intimidation — your questions answered