My husband and I had only been dating a few months when a stalker changed our lives. The moment remains crystalised in my mind. We’d spent the day with family and friends, and were encompassed by the sort of dopamine-fuelled joy new love brings. We were almost ready to call it a night when I heard a Facebook message request come through.

Absentmindedly, I glanced at my phone, and saw there was a message request. Immediately the account didn’t ring true – there was no profile photo, the name clearly fake. Reading the cruel and vulgar words, I reeled. Profane and crass, the sender’s rage was unmistakable. Within minutes, three more messages came through. All similar in nature.

The messages purported to be from someone who once dated my partner, but I had no idea who it was. A few days later, she made herself known , sending another string of abusive messages, only this time they were from her personal Facebook account.

This was the beginning of a three-year ordeal, during which I would be subjected to endless messages via social media and text. If I blocked her account, she would make new ones. Sometimes in her own name, at other times, using fake names – but always ensuring I knew it was her.

Sometimes, the contact was daily and intense; other times, weeks or even months would go by, allowing complacency to set in, before being blindsided by another attack. This is what stalking is – a sort of personal terrorism leaving the victim in a constant state of fear, powerless to an invisible attacker. You never know what’s coming, or when. The perverse by-product of this apparent obsession with me, was that the reverse also became true. This is what makes the experience so intense, the stalker becomes everywhere, even when they’re not.

At the time, I didn’t recognise my own experience as stalking. As an investigative journalist, I’ve written extensively about domestic and family violence, and was aware that stalking was common in the domestic abuser’s arsenal of weapons. But my knowledge of stalking as a standalone offence was limited.

Like most people, my understanding of stalking outside a domestic violence context was misguided. I envisaged heavy breathing on the telephone, a stranger hiding in the bushes, stealing underwear from the clothesline.

And while these behaviours do amount to stalking, it encompasses so much more than that. Defined by repeated and unwanted contact, stalking is about a pattern of behaviour that inflicts fear. Often the behaviours in isolation aren’t illegal, they may not even seem frightening from the outside looking in.

And herein lies the problem. Society’s collective lack of understanding about what stalking is, and its overwhelmingly dismissive attitude towards it, undermine the intense mental upheaval that victim-survivors experience.

An often all-encompassing trauma that can unleash suddenly, or creep up slowly (as it did for me). Like a dripping tap – annoying at first, but before long each drip seems louder, the frequency higher. Soon, you begin to hear it even when it’s not in the room, it keeps you awake at night, and eventually, starts to drive you mad.

It took almost three years and an official police charge before I recognised what was happening to me was stalking. I thought ignoring it was the best approach – after all, that’s what victim-survivors are frequently advised to do. Ironically, the longer the stalking went on, the less I felt I could do anything about it.

The first time I did reach out to police, I found myself minimising my experience, shrouded in shame and embarrassment; the officer’s dismissive response thrusting me further into silence.

But ignoring it didn’t make it go away. The behaviour escalated. What started as private messages to myself, and the people close to me, became a public and ongoing assault.

My online identity was stolen, with messages sent in my name; my address was posted online, so too, the date and location of my impending wedding. She knew where I’d been. She knew where I lived. She claimed to have relocated to my suburb.

It wasn’t until I began to research this crime, that I discovered just how widespread stalking is, and why it’s critical that community attitudes change.

Who hasn’t joked about stalking a new colleague, a new boss, or a friend’s next date?

“Stalking is romantic”, “victims are to blame”, and “stalking isn’t serious”, are some of the underlying beliefs identified in an academic study that analysed community attitudes towards stalking.

But if stalking is a crime, does community opinion really matter? The answer is yes, and there are a couple of reasons why: the direct impact on victim-survivors’ ability to properly process and define their experience (and their response to it), and the direct impact on their willingness to make a report.

Further complicating the situation is the fact these attitudes are not limited to the general public, but are often held by law enforcement too, even victims themselves.

Much like the false narrative of the rapist as a monstrous stranger, the more likely scenario of a stalker is that they are known to their victim. The deranged image most of us conjure up when we hear the word stalker amounts to little more than a caricature.

In reality, most stalkers are ordinary people. You run into them at the supermarket. You talk to them on the phone. They live an otherwise regular life.

As do their targets. Quietly suffering, often unable to put a label on what’s happening right under our noses, to extraordinary numbers of people.

But while stalker typologies and motivations vary, there is one thing all stalkers have in common: obsession and entitlement.

As we have done with coercive control over the past few years, we need to have a national conversation about stalking. But we can’t stop there; we need to educate and train law enforcement to properly respond to this growing global phenomenon.

Stalking is real, and it’s no joke. Recognition, validation and community support are critical to victim-survivors. It made all the difference to me. After years of keeping quiet, validation from the justice system gave me my voice back. Hearing the experiences of other victim-survivors gave me the courage to speak louder. I hope that by using my voice now, others will be encouraged to use theirs.

• Obsession: A journalist and victim-survivor’s investigation into stalking by Nicole Madigan is out through Pantera Press