“I’ve never been treated like that in my life! I felt like a sex offender.”

That was the reaction of a Georgia man, a former English teacher and aspiring songwriter who speaks with a gentle drawl, after his appeals hearing for a restraining order spitefully filed by his on-again, off-again girlfriend (whose mental stability was also on-again, off-again: he had turned to find her pointing a gun at him not long before). “We were like a married couple,” he told me. He was reeling from being publicly berated by the judge, a complete stranger, whose condemnation was based on an evidentiary review as lengthy and thoughtful as a trip to the men’s room.

“It was all over in about 10 minutes,” he said. He was rattled and still riding a wave of adrenaline. Barely out of the courthouse, he was concerned that the restraining order would pop up every time he was stopped for a routine traffic violation and that it would cling to his record forever and foul his ambitions.

Rightly.

All of those who’ve contacted me in the past year about their own cases have been identically tormented. They’re chafed and gnawed at not only by the injustice of this karaoke process—scripted score, add voice—but by the implications of having a restraining order on their permanent records, which implications are exactly as this man characterizes them: aggression, violence, sexual deviancy, etc.

In recent weeks and months, I’ve been contacted by an entrepreneur and Ph.D. whose entire life has been dismantled by assaults made through the courts both on him and his business—along with maliciously anonymous peripheral attacks like phony Craigslist ads and a webpage pornographically parodying a site crafted by his children. He says there have even been attempts on his life, compelling his wife and him to separate from their kids and relocate them to another part of the country for their safety. These assaults—including falsified restraining orders and bogus legal motions by a corrupt attorney (a phrase that may be redundant)—dominate his every waking moment. “I fight for my life every day,” he writes.

Another man, the victim of his ex-wife, a serial restraining order abuser intent to deny him access to his children, writes that he’s tempted to forfeit his visitation rights just to protect them from the fallout. “Recently she called me and asked if she could change some things on our parenting plan. I didn’t agree with the changes,” he writes, “and she told me I would regret it if I didn’t. Two weeks later I was being served with a restraining order. I didn’t show up to court, because this was the third time she had done this, and I was just tired of fighting.”

One woman, a young attorney barely out of law school who was seduced by an older, married peer (also an attorney), was issued an emergency restraining order petitioned on fraudulent grounds, the motive for which was no doubt to discard her and hastily shut her up. She aspires to work in federal law enforcement, a career ambition that stands to be permanently derailed by this man’s viciously selfish manipulations. “Please help,” she closes.

Yet another man, whose ex-wife is an attorney whose new husband is also attorney, has been hit with two restraining orders (the first dismissed as groundless; the second in effect pending appeal) since his ex-wife heard four months ago that he planned to remarry. “They are trying to ruin my wedding and my relationship with my fiancée,” he writes. “They thrive on using the kids as pawns. How do I protect myself from this?” He and his ex-wife have been divorced for 10 years.

Most recently a woman reports she’s been cattily threatened with a restraining order by her neighbor, a disturbed woman who monitors her every move and had physically assaulted her years before. She’s waiting apprehensively for the other shoe to drop.

The themes that run through these accounts are common ones: abuses by attorneys who know how to bend the system to their own self-serving ends, abuses by vindictive lovers and ex-lovers, abuses by the deranged, abuses by the parasitic.

The victims in these stories are the casualties who get whisked under the rug, purportedly in the interest of serving the greater public good.

Many more stories of restraining order abuses can found among the comments on various posts in this blog, and hundreds if not thousands more on this e-petition (the number of respondents to which has nearly trebled since the summer of 2011 when this blog was conceived and published).

Not surprisingly, most of the fraction of fraudulent restraining order victims who do summon the courage to share their stories withhold their names.

The restraining order process remains a crude, unprincipled, and stigmatizing one. Abuse is rampant and largely abetted by the courts, and the tide shows few signs of turning—though one recent visitor indicates that judges in his or her district have imposed a moratorium on issuing protection orders (no reason was given).

If the momentum of this runaway steamroller is finally arrested, it won’t be the result of studies, statistics, or reasoned appeals to social conscience. This debauched institution is all but immune to facts, as any of its victims can well attest. Change will only occur, because victims who refuse to quietly tolerate unjust punishments and public excoriation defiantly talk back.

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