Is more legislation enough, when it comes to tackling stalkers?

"Stalking is a horrendous crime," she says, arguing that present laws have failed to prevent obsessive stalkers from going to almost any lengths to monitor and control their victims’ lives.

And who would argue with that? Some of the measures being proposed are just common sense. It seems perverse that a court cannot make orders protecting victims from their stalkers after conviction, unless they had been imposed before the trial. This would appear to give convicted stalkers more rights than those who may be innocent, and has led to offenders continuing their harassment from behind bars.

Few people would argue with the principle of tightening the definition of stalking, to reduce the risk of offenders seeing charges reduced on technicalities. Ensuring that statutory bodies work together to ensure  no-one 'slips through the cracks' is also an obviously good thing.

Eyebrows may be raised, though, by Miss Cooper's comments about 'empowering police to give women the right to know the identity of their online stalkers', which does appear to suggest a somewhat biased presumption about who commits these types of crimes and who the victims are.

But the biggest question is surely going to be about whether more legislation is really enough. 

Stalkers are, by definition, not the most rational of people. Telling them certain behaviours are against the law is unlikely to make much difference without the resources to take them off the streets, and the prison places to detain them. 

As always with such measures, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.