“Emotional distress as the result of crime is a recurring theme for all victims of crime. The most common problem[s], affecting three quarters of victims, [include] fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping. These problems often result in the development of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

—Wikipedia, “Victimology”

Restraining orders are governmentally advertised and popularly perceived as deterrents to crime, particularly stalking/harassment and domestic violence. In other words, they’re supposed to do good.

It’s no wonder, then, that the idea that restraining orders may be used to commit crime and do grievous harm is regarded with indifference if not hostility.

The very real if inconvenient truth remains that victims of false allegations made to authorities and the courts present with the same symptoms highlighted in the epigraph: “fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping”—among a host of others. And that’s just the ones who aren’t robbed of everything that made their lives meaningful, including home, property, and family. In the latter case, post-traumatic stress disorder may be the least of their torments. They may be left homeless, penniless, childless, and emotionally scarred.

It’s time for a much overdue reality check: victims are victims, and it doesn’t matter one iota whether a victim is injured by a recognized crime or one that society prefers to pretend doesn’t occur because it’s complicit in its commission. Treating victims like fiends, in fact, compounds victimization manifold, as any zealous bandier of the phrase victim-blaming should eagerly corroborate.

The quoted Wikipedia entry observes that we (among other countries) have a National Crime Victimization Survey (“a tool to measure the existence of actual, rather than reported, crimes”) to determine our country’s victimization rate. “This survey enables the government to estimate the likelihood of victimization by rape, sexual assault, robbery, assault, theft, household burglary, and motor vehicle theft for the population as a whole as well as for segments of the population such as women….”

False allegations, predictably, aren’t recognized as criminal, which of course both false reporting to the police (a statutory misdemeanor) and perjury (a statutory felony) most certainly are. Moreover, and significantly, all of the crimes enumerated in the quotation immediately above may be abetted or excused by the state’s endorsement of restraining order fraud—and at the same time. Victims of restraining order abuse may not only be victims of assault (or even conceivably rape) by their false accusers; by virtue of the state’s validating false accusers’ allegations, the accused may literally be stripped (robbed) of their belongings (i.e., property, vehicles, and money), and ousted from their homes, besides, and forced to forfeit entitlement to them (along with access to their own children): grand theft everything.

E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. We’re talking not only about trivializing suffering or “blaming the victim” but of punishing the victim to a cruel and unusual extreme—and congratulating ourselves for doing it. (Feminist) rights advocates make much ado about society’s discounting or trivializing the suffering of victims, ignoring that the state may, for example, yank victims of domestic violence from their homes and kick them sobbing to the curb if their abusers finger them on restraining orders first.

Blaming victims of false allegations made on restraining orders IS “blaming victims of terror for not wearing bulletproof armour,” and why false allegations on restraining orders are so effective (and devastating) is because of the basic message of posters like this: When victimhood is asserted, it’s not to be questioned.

The perceptual blind that preserves these crimes from being exposed and redressed is the “unspoken, politically correct rule that the role of the victim…is NOT to be explored” acknowledged by Dr. Ofer Zur in “Rethinking ‘Don’t Blame the Victim’: The Psychology of Victimhood.” The presiding prejudice that procurers of restraining orders are victims not only enables false accusers to commit theft and abuse on a grand scale (in cases effacing the lives of their male and female victims entirely); it enables them to do so with authorization and impunity, and on top of it all to be rewarded with sympathy. This is victim-blaming with a megaphone.

Victims—victims—may be incarcerated (locked in cages) and serially persecuted (in cases, for years) after having been tossed in the street and having had everything they owned and cared about taken from them. A survey of the accounts on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” will make the horror plain to any reader with a soul (or even just an ounce of honesty).

Denial of this horror by agents of the abuse industry underscores that rights advocacy has become corrupted by dogma, politics, and cash. If it was ever truly about justice, any claim that its mainstream manifestations still are is beyond disingenuous. It’s criminal.

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