The Law and You
Feeling Harassed?
Elyned Ashcroft
Elyned Ashcroft is a solicitor with Cartmell Shepherd of Carlisle who are ranked the top agricultural law practice in the North West by the independent Chambers guide. She lives on a hill farm in the Pennines with her husband and three children, where they keep Kendal Rough sheep and registered Fell ponies. Her contact is eda@cartmells.co.uk
Unless we live alone on an island we all have neighbours. Disputes between neighbours motivated by many reasons, jealousy, resentment, desire to expand boundaries, annex land etc etc are common place. Often a side effect of the main dispute is a campaign by one of the parties of acts of harassment against the other. Done perhaps in the misguided hope that their “victim” will lose heart and give up on the main issue of dispute or, possibly, to exact retribution or revenge. The acts are often quite trivial as individual incidents but can have a damaging cumulative effect on the victim. Harassment of others is not limited to the area of neighbour disputes and may be suffered as a consequence of a campaign by individuals or groups determined to prevent activities of which they disapprove carried on by others.
The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 was enacted to deal with the problem of harassment. It creates both civil and criminal offences. The provisions of this Act provide individuals subject to anti-social behaviour with a remedy. The key elements are that the perpetrator is:
- A person pursuing a course of conduct
- which amounts to harassment and
- which he knows or should know amounts to harassment.
The victim can issue civil proceedings under this Act for an injunction to stop the person harassing them. If the perpetrator breaches the injunction then the Court can order his/her arrest. The victim can also seek damages for anxiety and loss caused by the harassment.
For there to be a course of conduct, where the acts are against an individual, there must be at least two incidents. Where the acts are against a group of two or more people then there must be at least one incident against each of the individuals named as complainants in the proceedings. Evidence is required of each of the acts of which the victim(s) is/are complaining. In either event, the series of incidents must take place fairly close to the date of the application to the Court. Harassment is given its ordinary meaning, ie behaviour intended to disturb, distress, alarm, annoy, upset.
The Police can also take action and can charge the offender under the Act. A criminal conviction of the ordinary offence of harassment carries a potential sentence of six months in Prison or a fine of up to £5,000. However, in neighbour disputes the Police are often very reluctant to intervene and are likely to use the familiar words “civil matter” to distance themselves especially if they see the events as tit for tat. Knowledge of this act can be used to persuade the Police that harassment is also a Police matter and to encourage them to at least speak to the offender and perhaps to issue a harassment warning. If the Police agree to do this it may make the offender realise the seriousness of his/her behaviour and will be useful if they carry out more incidents. This is because the harassment warning will remain on the Police file and if action is then taken either by the Police or by the victim in a civil case it will be useful evidence of a course of conduct. Similarly, merely reporting the incident to the Police will also provide useful evidence.
Section 4 of the Act makes a specific offence of harassment which causes another to fear, on at least two occasions, that violence will be used against them. This is a more serious offence which could result on conviction in a five year jail term and/or fine or both. If a charge is laid under Section 4 and the perpetrator is not found guilty of the more serious offence of causing fear of violence it is still open to the jury to find them guilty of the ordinary offence of harassment under Section 2.