I need safety. I need a GOOD lock for my door!

For more than 12 years, I have been the target of something known as "sadistic stalking". In my case, it also includes a lot of community bullying here in Portsmouth.

I took this photo after I came home in June in 2019 one evening. I could see that someone had just been at my door and I knew that someone had been inside my flat again. I found this mess on my kitchen counter, started cleaning up, then decided to take a photo. Those lettuces were on my window sill. It had happened once before, this kind of mess.

For many years, one or more people have been going into my flat anonymously by picking the locks when I am out. Initially, I came home a few times to find the door unlocked. I was pretty sure that I had locked the door. It is something you do automatically, right?

I figured that something must have distracted me that made me forget to lock up. I scolded myself but thought nothing further of it. But I also received odd e-mails that sounded as if someone was actually talking about things in my flat, had actually been in my flat and for instance had seen that I had several reading glasses all over the flat. 

Then signs began to be left that made very clear that someone was going into my flat. Items were moved, notes written, things unplugged, things destroyed, things taken, things returned and also some rather bizarre and creepy things happened.

I've even come home once or twice to find the door demonstratively standing open. That feels like someone's spitting in your face and you don't even know who it is. It makes you feel so violated. The following morning, as I was taking my shower, I discovered that some really bizarre crap had been carried out in my bathroom.

I work from home, using computers. I rent a small flat behind a motorcycle shop. I am next to its garage. What was also happening was that my computer kept getting hacked and I didn't understand why I couldn't put a stop to the hacking (because while I was not an IT expert, I was still decent enough at IT). I never expected anyone to be going into my flat to get direct access to my equipment! But that explained why I couldn't stop the hacking.

This has been combined with all sorts of community bullying. Think of for example two lads saying "good afternoon" to me one Sunday and then dumping a bucket with liquid over me. I pretended nothing had happened, went home, took a shower and washed my hair. I assumed that the liquid was water, but it could just as easily have been urine or something. This kind of crap started happening as soon as I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth, in 2009.

Until very recently, nobody was interested in talking about this and helping me resolve whatever this is. As a result of all this crap, I haven't been able to support myself financially for a long time. It sucks!

I recently started to make more and more noise about this, was starting to feel that I would have to start dancing around naked in Guildhall Square to get anyone to pay any attention to me (to what I was saying), but then a social worker called. Just the fact that she stepped into my shoes for a moment and said that I should be able to feel safe in my home and could not under these circumstances made me feel really grateful. For the first time in years, someone HEARD ME. Someone listened.

The problem with being bullied - if that is what the lock-picking and other crap is - is that everyone tends to blame you for it. Everyone assumes that there is something "wrong" with you. Normal people don't have stuff like this happening to them so you can't be normal, can you, so it's your own fault. But I didn't even know anyone here! Nobody here could have any beef with me because nobody here knew me.

I was just a self-employed woman who was over the moon when she found a flat here and was finally able move away from Southampton, which I didn't find very pleasant.

I have had all sorts of explanations for why I became targeted in this town. At a business workshop, when I talked about this, hoping to get some tips for how to resolve this, one woman asked me "Where are you from?". Amsterdam. "Oh, then that's why." And that was it. Everyone present at that workshop seemed to think that this was normal. WTF?!

I've also had hints that it is like hazing, a sort of welcoming ritual. But I have been here for 12 years now and the crap still has not stopped. 

I've tried to move away a few times, but that is hard when you no longer have your own income. I have changed one lock and added two more, so I have four simple locks on the door that get picked too easily. I have tried a sound alarm but when I accidentally triggered it myself nothing happened. Everyone around here shrugs about sound alarms.

I've tried a cheap motion-activated camera so that maybe I could find out who was going into my flat all the time so that I could go shout at someone and tell him or her to stop the crap. (Going to the police is useless. Done that a bazillion times.) So I hid the camera in my home, but I found that when I walked around, that did not trigger the camera either. So that was useless.

I tried to remain as positive as possible for a long time, also so as not to upset the locals and trigger for example retaliation, but this stuff IS happening. it is destroying my life and I HAVE to stop trying not to focus on it because it is all so bloody negative. Who likes to focus on negative things that they're totally powerless about ? I don't. It tends to make me angry and sour-faced. But this crap simply cannot go on. (I also have not been getting a lot of my postal mail since I moved in to my present flat, so this is not lockdown-related. Some local mail at this address took 5 to 12 months to reach me. Once I got handed a wet and muddy package containing six months' worth of random letters.)

There are five or six routes to my flat - depending on how much lock-picking happens along the way, as there are two entrances to the 3-flat building in which I live - but they all lead to the one door that is supposed to keep people out of my flat and doesn't.

There is a lot more that I need to do. My landlord is trying to evict me, for example. But he has said that I can change the locks; he doesn't care as long as it does not cost him any money. He's tried to evict me twice before. I no longer make any money and can't pay my bills but without first securing my door, everything else that I do is a complete waste of time and effort.

I have made an appointment with a locksmith to assess what can be fitted. That assessment is free. Installing the lock would cost me £200. The lock itself would likely cost me between £200 and £300. A guy at the local Spar shop gave me a tip for a really good lock, but the locksmith may have some good ideas too.

Help me please. I am desperate.

Thanks,

Angelina

PS

I am sick of being told to apply for benefits, too. Without all this crap going on, there is no reason why I should not simply be able to support myself again, like I used to! Without all this crap that’s been going on, there is absolutely no reason why I should need to depend on benefits, dammit. As a foreigner, I don't even appear to qualify for all the benefits that I am supposed to qualify for, but that's beside the point. I should not need to have to depend on benefits, dammit.

I am setting up a new business to tackle workplace bullying and also generally speaking, diversity issues in the UK. Otherisation problems. But without securing my home and my computers first, I cannot do a damn hing!

Covid is currently keeping me here, of course. As some of you know, I have made several attempts to escape from all of this over the past 4 or 5 years, in vain. As some of you also know, I was briefly homeless, back in 2010/2011, as a result of whatever this is that is going on. I though that it would stop after that. I also thought that it would stop, fizzle out, period. But it has not. I have no idea how to make my life work with all this crap going on, so I have to stop the crazy crap. I just have to. And it starts with the door to my flat.

I have set up a similar campaign on JustGiving.