Month July 2013

Why Judges Are Scared of Girls: On Sexual Politics and Restraining Order Injustice

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A not insignificant reason for judges’ pandering to women who claim to be afraid of this man or that man is their consciousness of the impact that a feminist backlash would have on their careers if they were to discount a woman’s allegation of fear and then that fear were to be proved valid. So long robe and gavel.

It’s happened.

Knee-jerk feminists, to quote philosopher and feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, are “brilliant work-shoppers, networkers, [and] organizers…. There has never been a more effective army of busybodies. And they know how to work the system.” They’re a political force to be reckoned with and one today’s society has been conditioned to truckle to. Seven or eight years ago, Harvard President Larry Summers was given the bum’s rush for making statements construed as derogatory to women at a conference on gender imbalances in science. And a judge is no less vulnerable to the feminist chopping block than a university president.

In theory, civil rulings are based on a preponderance of evidence. In practice, at least in the fast and loose arena of restraining order administration, they observe the rule that it’s better to err on the side of caution.

And it isn’t only men who suffer the consequences of this dereliction. Because the court must be seen to be fair and balanced, women are conversely victimized by unscrupulous men in accordance with the same politically slackened evidentiary standard. (In fact, though only one in five restraining orders is issued to a woman, at least as many women as men have submitted comments to this blog chronicling torturous restraining order ordeals—and some of these women even report they’ve been victimized by other women.)

The rationale echoes that of the witch trials: if a person was never a threat at all and doesn’t violate the restraining order, s/he appears to have been tamed by it, and the court can congratulate itself; if s/he was a threat and violates the restraining order, the court was right to intervene…and can congratulate itself.

Bottom line: We did our job.

Which is of course untrue. The court’s job isn’t to protect and serve the public. That’s the job of the police, which is why it says so on their cars. And it certainly isn’t the court’s job to protect and serve the career interests of its judges. The court’s job is to protect the dignity of our legal system and to impartially and diligently serve the cause of justice.

And none other.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Feminism and Gender Guilt: On Restraining Order Policy’s Encouraging Judges to Abuse Men

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A police officer’s job is to enforce policy, not interpret it. And policy respecting allegations made pursuant to seeking a restraining order, in particular allegations made by women, is to take the truth of those allegations for granted.

Judges, on the other hand, are paid—and quite handsomely—to interpret evidence and testimony, and to apply policy based on deliberated conclusions.

So how is it so many men are railroaded through a process that may be initiated on no evidence at all, may strip them of their most valued investments and every bit of social and financial equity they’ve built in their lives—kids, home, money, property, business, and reputation—and may ensure that they’re never able to recover what they’ve been deprived of?

Feminists don’t acknowledge their political might, because that would be disadvantageous to their accumulating more of it. They continue to plead victimization and to promote skewed or bogus statistics like one in four women are prey to rapists or attempted rapists, women earn a mere fraction of what men do, girls are ignored by their teachers, and battery is the leading cause of birth defects and increases by 40% on Super Bowl Sunday.

Enterprising journalists like Ken Ringle and dissident feminist scholars Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia have long ago debunked all of these claims, yet they continue to circulate. The feminist propaganda machine hums right along. And its malign and maligning influence has been very effective.

(Besides the aforementioned feminist scholars, journalist Cathy Young and Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, have called giving attention to restraining order administration long overdue—in articles published 10 to 20 years ago.)

Judges and the judicial system proceed in matters of protection of women as father-guardians (which mainstream feminists don’t seem to find patronizing or infantilizing). The rhetoric is defendants are presumed innocent; the practice is they’re presumed guilty. Judges—more often than not male—pander to the women who come before them to beg their intervention; men are treated like police suspects.

Judges of these matters, like the women who introduce them, aren’t bound by the same ethical restrictions that obtain in other sorts of cases (especially if there are no lawyers present). A detective in the county attorney’s office I spoke with put it this way: because restraining orders grew out of a clamor to address domestic violence, judges are inclined to let their inner vigilantes off leash when a male defendant appears before them. They’re glad to have a trussed target for their frustrated wrath and to play the white knight.

The slack standards that govern restraining order administration are defended as leveling the playing field. They’re in fact engineered to level men. The judges who do the administering are predisposed by policy and propaganda to regard male defendants through jaundiced eyes and to bring the gavel down on their heads.

It’s probably very cathartic for them.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Restraining Order Fraud and Female Victimization of Men

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It shouldn’t be any mystery why with millions of restraining orders being issued each year in the Internet age complaints of abuses aren’t louder and more numerous: stigma.

A woman’s having taken out a restraining order against him—particularly one alleging violence or fear of violence—isn’t something a man is apt to broadcast, even if the order was grounded on sheer lies (and especially if those lies aren’t ones he’s able to expose as such). Allegations of fear or threat by women aren’t held to any standard of substantiation. They can be completely vaporous (pardon the oxymoron), and judges are cool with that.

Also, the experience of being publicly shamed is a harrowing one and one a man isn’t likely to want to revisit. (There’s always, besides, the apprehension of incurring further malice from the courts. For many injunction defendants, ever again having access to home, property, or children is entirely subject to judicial impulse.)

An unscrupulous woman not only enjoys the gratification of being rewarded for her fraud by a paternal system that regards her as a fragile fledgling in need of special protections; she also enjoys the impunity guaranteed by her victim’s fear of humiliation and social and professional condemnation.

Society today condescends to give a sympathetic ear to women’s plaints; men are still expected to suck it up. Feminists promote a double standard they profess to oppose to reap the benefit: not gender equity but political advantage.

There are a number of sites on the Internet that advocate for “men’s rights” (see how even the phrase sounds absurd?) like A Voice for Men and Men’s Activism News Network. You’re unlikely to hear them cited on NPR. Feminism is chic and trendy: VAWA! NOW! AAUW! The Vagina Monologues!

“Masculinism” isn’t a word.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“Why Would Someone Get a False Restraining Order?”

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This question pops up a lot.

Simply rephrasing it can dispel some of the wonderment: “What would someone have to gain by falsely accusing someone else of conduct society condemns?”

Satisfaction of a spiteful impulse might come to mind.

I remember looking at a book once by a guy named Hayduke. It was chock full of ingenious vengeance schemes—pretty much all of them criminal or bordering on it. Lying on a restraining order to sate a hurtful yen, while technically criminal, is never treated as such and may well succeed in criminalizing the target of that yen.

Common allegations on restraining orders are harassment, stalking, danger, and violence. Any of these—and especially the last—can doom a person’s employment or professional aspirations, tear relationships apart, and gnaw at and vex the innocently accused indefinitely (to his or her physical and psychological erosion). Allegations like this from a domestic partner can deprive the same victim of assets and access to loved ones. The use of fraudulent restraining orders to gain the upper hand in child custody battles is pretty much cliché.

And restraining orders don’t just vanish from public record when the expire. In some regions, there are even restraining order registries to make finding out who’s had a restraining order sworn out against him or her conveniently (and alluringly) accessible by the public. The political push is toward making such registries universal.

It’s possible that the question, “Why would someone get a false restraining order?” is prompted by a disbelief that a person could be so unethical. Such a disbelief betrays the questioner’s naivety.

People frame people for crimes or commit crimes to hurt others every day. Abusing restraining orders is just more fail-safe. Perjury (lying in court or on a sworn statement) is never prosecuted, and restraining orders are generally free for the asking. You get the state to exercise your malice for you, it costs you nothing, and everyone extends you their sympathies.

The worst that happens when someone lies to obtain a restraining order is that it’s overturned on appeal. And even if it’s quashed, the recipient of the fraudulent restraining order will have been put through hell (and possibly cost several thousands of dollars in attorney fees). In fact succeeding in having a restraining order vacated (canceled) doesn’t necessarily mean it disappears from public record. Even if a fraud loses, s/he wins.

Clearly then the answer to the question, “Why would someone get a false restraining order?” is “Why not?”

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

A Liar’s Dream Medium: On Why Fraudulent Restraining Orders Are So Effective

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vivid imagination

Restraining order allegations defy physics. They can self-sustain indefinitely fueled on nothing more than human credulity and their gratification of our appetite for the unseemly. They’re paid the same intently lurid curiosity as a wreck on the side of the road.

Auditors can’t avert their ears.

I read stories about the horrors endured by victims of false restraining orders every week, and I’d still listen with sensitivity to someone’s telling me s/he “had to get a restraining order.” It’s an irresistible impulse.

Just the phrase restraining order prompts a preconditioned reflex in the hearer. Live Pavlov’s dinner bell. It’s certainly one of the most prejudicial phrases in the English language, surpassing even “Beware of Dog.”

That’s why the restraining order offers liars a dream medium: whatever they write on one becomes “true.”

It’s that Pavlovian conditioning. We presume that someone who applies for a restraining order has a genuine need. Even police officers and judges, who encounter the unscrupulous and the scheming on a daily basis, take this for granted. They’ve been trained to. Hefty federal grants are provided to local police departments and courts in return for their mandating that their officers submit to that training and consent to accept allegations pursuant to obtaining a restraining order as factual.

And since restraining orders are approved by judges on the spot without the people whom they’re issued against even knowing about them, there aren’t any naysayers to interrupt or object to a liar’s allegations.

A fraud has a captive audience and can just let ’er rip.

The more outrageous a fraud’s lies, furthermore, the more effective they usually are. They’re not only that much likelier to bias police officers and judges but anyone else they’re told to. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, it’s assumed, and frauds who lie big blow a whole lot of smoke.

Counterintuitively, the broader the fraud, the more certain it is to go over.

Upon convincing a judge of his or her need for a restraining order—child’s play—a liar has an official document that says s/he’s a victim who’s weathered a grievous ordeal, and s/he can get even freer with the details when relating his or her “travail” to others. Say you “had to get a restraining order,” and all heads tilt in your direction, keen for the salacious details. Applying for a restraining order—which entails considerably less nuisance, for example, than applying for a driver’s license—creates a sensation (and waves of positive feedback and attention to nourish a liar’s ego).

And the damage to the liar’s victim is done possibly before s/he’s even had the restraining order brought to his or her attention.

To counteract a false restraining order requires that a recipient convince a second judge that the first one (his or her peer) screwed up or was hoodwinked. Not an obstacle easily surmounted. What a wanton fraud can accomplish in a 45-minute excursion to the courthouse may preoccupy and torment his or her victim for years to come.

A restraining order based on lies carefully, or even carelessly, stitched together is like Frankenstein’s monster: once a judge throws the switch, “It’s Alive!” And calamitous.

Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, burning a fraudulent restraining order won’t make it go away.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“Overwhelmed, Outgunned, and Completely Disrespected”: One Woman’s Restraining Order Hell

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I was recently emailed by a 50-year-old woman who desperately wants to see her mother before her mother dies. This woman, whom I’ll call Natasha, has been restrained by court injunction from entering, calling, or nearing her childhood home.

The restraining order was petitioned by her father, an attorney who has “unlimited resources.” Natasha herself is jobless for the first time in her life, and doesn’t have the means to hire a lawyer of her own.

Natasha’s mother was hospitalized in September 2011 for over 70 days in intensive care. Natasha didn’t learn about her mother’s condition for three weeks, because her father and brothers, whom she alleges had psychologically and physically abused her, didn’t want her around. She says the physical abuse, doled out over two decades, was at the hands of her brothers and that this abuse was tacitly condoned by her father and sometimes explicitly sanctioned. “Far worse, though, was the psychological abuse from my father,” Natasha says, “who told me I was lying, it didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad, I must have done something to deserve it.”

Natasha has lived separately from her family for over 15 years.

Natasha stayed with her mother throughout her hospitalization, while her father and brothers merely checked in for a few minutes at a time (always as a group). Her mother’s doctors told her “that there was a 100% chance my mother would not survive. For the next 45 days, I sat at her side and held her hand while her heart stopped and started back up. I was not going to let her die alone in a hospital if I could help it.”

Her mother lived.

Once her mother was discharged, however, Natasha says she was only able to visit her three times before her father applied for a restraining order to drive her off. Telephone calls she made to her mother prior to the court order’s being issued weren’t put through.

“But every time I talked to her, she told me without prompting that she missed me and wished she heard from me more often,” Natasha writes. She also says her mother, who is paralyzed, told her she has to invent complaints just to get her sons to come into her room to see her.

Natasha’s brothers, 33 and 49, live with their parents and have never worked.

Despite the household presence of his two adult sons, Natasha’s father, who hired an attorney to prosecute his case and who is himself a well known lawyer in the local probate court, readily convinced a judge that he was a victim of elder abuse, that he was afraid of his daughter, and that she had tried to extort money from him. Also that she “could not appreciate” the precariousness of her mother’s condition. “He lied in his request everywhere,” she says.

Natasha even reports that she “filed restraining order requests” against her father first but that the court has refused to hear them.

She hasn’t seen her mother, who has undergone another life-threatening surgery since Natasha was issued a restraining order, for nearly a year.

“I just want to spend some time with my mother,” she says. “I am afraid I will never see her again. I know I will not be allowed to attend her funeral. I am so angry, so frustrated, so hurt, and so powerless to do anything.”

She says she intends to file a complaint against her father with the state bar association. And maybe another against the judge who has disregarded her petitions.

Guess how effective that will be.

Copyright © 2013 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com