Tag battered women

“On the Receiving End of a Sociopath’s Lies”: A Professional Mom’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

Moderator 8 Comments

The following account is reproduced almost verbatim from an email of recent vintage. Its writer is a professional woman and single mother of three with whom I corresponded last year while she was embroiled in strife—legal, medical, and emotional (a synergy of torments that’s been reported here before). The capsule version of her story is that she was in an abusive relationship (including violently abusive), sought a restraining order, which was dismissed on appeal, and then was issued an order petitioned by her abuser, which she reports was based on fraud, and which was nevertheless upheld despite her appealing it. She brought criminal charges, also. Her abuser smoothly extricated himself from those, too. The victim of assault is the one with the “restraining order” on her permanent record. She asked that I not use her name because she’s “terrified of  the possibility of repercussions.”

In her own words, which more poignantly express the psychic trauma of procedural abuses than any I’ve ever read:

My active involvement with my sociopath has, mercifully, ended.

[H]e refused to accept a plea deal, he took his assault case to a jury trial, and he was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. His lies were, apparently, more believable than my truth, or, best case, the jurors didn’t really believe him but couldn’t find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen enough of the court system to learn that the truth is completely immaterial, and that the officers of the court will consistently choose the “easy” ruling over the one that is true. If the matter before them requires some thought, some extrapolation, some reading between the lines, and/or some backbone, forget it. The truth will be jettisoned faster than a grenade with its pin pulled.

I don’t really know how to describe how profoundly my brushes with domestic abuse/restraining order abuse/generalized legal abuse have affected me. In a few short months, a year will have passed since the criminal trial against my abuser took place. Four years will have passed since the whole odyssey began on Easter of 2011, when I walked into the police station and reported my abuser’s attack after agonizing overnight about whether or not I should do so. Imagine that—agonizing overnight about whether or not to report a crime! On some level, I must have known even then how very awry it all could go.

Let me just attempt to put this into perspective: I have lived through my parents’ divorce. I have boarded an Amtrak train headed for New Orleans at 16 years old in an effort to escape a miserable childhood. I have been scarred by the shame of being a high school dropout and then gone on to receive a college education. I have experimented with more drugs than I can count on two hands. I have traveled all over Europe with little more than a backpack and a few pfennigs. I have been robbed at gunpoint while working third shift in a Shell-Mart in Anniston, Alabama. I have scuba-dived off the coast of Honduras. I have watched my stepmother fight to regain pulmonary function after she was stabbed by a purse-snatching punk in the alley behind her home in Washington, D.C., only to watch her die an agonizing death from lung cancer fifteen years later. I have held a lion cub in my arms. I have lain helplessly in a hospital bed as not one, not two, but three premature babies were whisked from my body and transferred straight into the NICU. I have survived breast cancer, and then my mother’s untimely death from a hospital-acquired infection four months after my diagnosis. I have been sliced and diced and blasted by radiation. I have been exposed to, and treated for, tuberculosis. I have lived through bacterial meningitis and undergone a blood patch procedure after a botched spinal tap. I have been resuscitated with Narcan after being given too much IV narcotic during an acute episode of kidney stones. I have skydived over the Newport, Rhode Island coastline. I have loved multiple dogs and cats and then held them in my arms when it was their time to leave this earth. I have fought for my children and for myself against a relentlessly bitter spouse during a contentious, protracted divorce.

Not one of those things has affected me as deeply as being on the receiving end of a sociopath’s lies, and the legal system’s subsequent validation of those lies. There is no “coming out the other side” of a public, on-the-legal-record character assassination. It gnaws at me on a near-daily basis like one of those worms that lives inside those Mexican jumping beans for sale to tourists on the counters of countless cheesy gift shops in Tijuana.

I have sort of moved on; I mean, what else can one do, particularly when one has young children? But the horror, outrage, shame, and, yes, fury engendered by being wrongly accused by a perpetrator, and then having that perpetrator be believed, chafes at me constantly. Some things born of irritation and pressure are ones of beauty, like a pearl, or a diamond, but not this. This is a stoma on one’s soul—it never heals, it’s always chapped and raw, and if you’re not careful, it can leak and soil everything around it.

These days, when sleep escapes me, which seems to be fairly frequently, I often relive the various court hearings associated with this shit show. One is the court hearing for the restraining order that my abuser sought against me (and which was granted) based on his completely vague, bullshit story that he felt “afraid” of me—this from the beast that had assaulted me on numerous occasions, slashed my tires, and had a documented history of abusing previous girlfriends. Another is his trial for assault and battery, during which I was forced to undergo a hostile, nasty, and innuendo-laced cross-examination by his scumbag defense attorney in front of a courtroom full of strangers. But the hearing that really gnaws at me and fills me with an almost homicidal enmity for the judge overseeing it is the one where I was requesting a restraining order against my abuser, this after a particularly heinous assault in the days following my cancer diagnosis and my partial mastectomy.

That judge apparently believed my abuser’s bald-faced, self-serving, and absurdly improbable lies over my detailed, accurate, and horrific account of his behavior immediately following my surgery. That judge believed that a well-dressed, employed, and reasonably intelligent woman would drag her ass to court a week after a life-threatening diagnosis and major surgery just to harass her blameless ex. My memory of the surreal, humiliating, and completely unexpected ruling that day, made even more galling by the judge’s proclamation that he found the defendant to be “more credible” than me, is as grievously harrowing today as it was then.

To say that I feel indignant about it would be an understatement. Take indignation, add a dollop of pain, some hefty pinches of fear, embarrassment, and hopelessness, and a heaping dose of fury, and you’ve got a toxic mix of emotions that, if I don’t actively squelch them whenever they surface, could blow the top of my skull clean off. No amount of therapy can mitigate this particular affront; I’ve learned that the best I can hope for is some measure of containment. Kind of like radioactive waste.

foreverI will have that prick’s bogus restraining order on my record today, tomorrow, next week, and on and on into perpetuity. I am a licensed professional whose employers require a full background check prior to being hired. I honestly don’t know how that restraining order was missed by the company that my most recent employer contracted to perform my pre-employment vetting. I live with the ever-present dread that someday, someone will unearth the perverse landmine that my abusive ex planted in my legal record, and that dread hasn’t lessened one whit since the day the restraining order was granted.

I understand that the existence of a past restraining order can be a valuable red flag for the police when dealing with domestic abusers and stalkers. Most domestic abusers are repeat offenders, so prior bad acts can help to establish a pattern that law enforcement should be aware of (though, confoundingly, these same bad acts are not admissible during any trial). Even though I’m not necessarily comfortable with the existence of a permanent registry of all restraining orders—both those that are sought and those that are actually granted (which, as you know, is what currently exists)—what I’m not comfortable with is that this information is available not just to the police, not just to other governmental agencies, but to the public at large! My height and weight taken while at the doctor’s office are protected by law. A hospital cannot disclose if I was treated there for a sore throat. But an inflammatory, defamatory, embarrassing, unsubstantiated, and oftentimes false restraining order affidavit can be obtained by whoever strolls into a courthouse and requests a copy from the clerk.

I don’t believe this registry will ever be abolished, because restraining order abuse isn’t “sexy” and no one thinks it could ever happen to her, but can we at least limit who can access this information and the circumstances under which they can access it? It’s mind-boggling to me. It’s just so goddamn devastating to the people who are unfairly stigmatized, and, call me pessimistic, but I don’t think these casualties will ever have a voice.

[Today] I’m working full-time at a job that I basically enjoy, and my three children are flourishing. I no longer feel that I am defined by my intensely negative experiences with my abuser and with the legal system, or that my life is being hijacked on a daily basis. I go days at a time without any of this crossing my mind. To say that I have “gotten over it,” though, would be a lie. A piece of me was lost because of this, and an emotional fissure was left behind, that, from what I can tell, simply cannot be fixed or ignored. My only succor is my halfhearted hope that karma is, indeed, a bitch.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Accusation of “Whatever”: How We’ve Forgotten What Restraining Orders Were For

Moderator 6 Comments

In an offhand response to a comment yesterday, I remarked that restraining orders weren’t meant to provide people with a sense of security; they were meant to secure people from danger.

There’s a distinction, as I also remarked, and it’s been forgotten.

So entrenched an institution of law and so commonplace has the “restraining order” become that people assume that a foreboding or a feeling of unease or apprehension is grounds to petition one (and judicial performance in no way discourages this assumption and may reward it).

I’m even asked, earnestly, “Can I get a restraining order if she called me a bitch?”

My response, though it inclines toward skepticism, is nevertheless, “Who knows?” If a judge says, “Sure,” then the answer is, “Sure.” Whatever the judge says goes. Judicial latitude in these matters is boundless. Statutes may explicitly license the trial court to do “as it sees fit” or “as it deems appropriate.”

By this standard, people are removed from their homes. By this standard, people are denied jobs. By this standard, people are entered into public registries and prohibited from working with or around children and ever seeing their own.

This is how I lost my day-to-day stability to be a normal, reasonable, and gainfully employed person in the community’s eyes [comment submitted four hours ago].

What’s been forgotten is that the motive justification for an unarguably tendentious, superficial, and baggy procedure was real and immediate danger. Restraining orders were conceived as a quick fix to a problem that was both rampant and, more urgently, ignored 35 years ago. That problem was domestic battery.

Today, restraining orders are a quick fix to a new rampant problem: accusation of “whatever.”

Allegations of domestic violence are not today discounted by authorities, as they might have been in the 1970s and 80s, nor is making them scorned by the public as “talking out of church.” Sympathy is all but universal.

Not only, then, is the motive justification for an unarguably tendentious, superficial, and baggy procedure a relic of the past, but violence may not even be alleged in a majority of petitions.

I’ve been in close correspondence with a man who’s challenging the constitutionality of a restraining order against him that exerts “prior restraint.” He’s forbidden to talk about someone online—not temporarily but for all time. He’s been restrained, in other words, for speech acts he hasn’t committed.

In First Amendment law, a prior restraint is government action that prohibits speech or other expression before it can take place. There are two common forms of prior restraints. The first is a statute or regulation that requires a speaker to acquire a permit or license before speaking, and the second is a judicial injunction that prohibits certain speech. Both types of prior restraint are strongly disfavored, and, with some exceptions, generally unconstitutional [Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute].

He’s appealing the trial court’s injunction on First Amendment grounds, and constitutional law is on his side.

Consider, though, that any number of restraining orders are issued on a similar basis. People are restrained not for acts that injured someone but for acts that possibly, perhaps, conceivably could indicate a potential intention to injure someone.

In criminal cases, judges have no reluctance about sternly pronouncing: “Speculation has no place in a courtroom.” Speculation, however, is the heart and soul of civil restraining order cases. Judges may “infer fear” based on the alleged actions of a defendant, and on this tenuously speculative basis, form a ruling whose consequences may exercise a profoundly negative influence on that person’s life.

In other words, people are punished not for things they’ve done, per se, but for things someone feels (or intimates) they might do.

The purpose of restraining orders was not to provide complainants of fear with a sense of security; the purpose of restraining orders was to secure complainants of injury from further harm.

Harm isn’t speculative. It leaves very visible traces.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Since this post was published it has reportedly become possible for Minnesotans to apply for restraining orders online to prohibit, among other things, “repeated incidents of unwanted…gestures” (cf. the First Amendment).

Not All Feminists Are Women, but All Feminists Are Responsible for Why False Accusations Are Rampant and Why They Work

Moderator 2 Comments

Feminist lobbying is to blame for the injustice of restraining order and related laws and policies. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

False accusations shouldn’t work, but they do—commonly, and not uncommonly to devastating effect.

That’s thanks to feminist crusaders, who may or may not represent Women, and who may or may not be women. This clarification isn’t intended for men who’ve been abused by court process; they don’t have any problem criticizing feminists, whatever form they come in.

Women, however, do—even women who’ve been abused by court process themselves. The clarification is for them.

Consider:

(1994) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence. May I forward our research findings to your office?”

(1998) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some more startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence—also to tell you about the exciting progress we’ve made toward alerting the public to  the horrors of domestic abuse. Of course, nothing is ever enough when the stakes are this high!”

(2005) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. How are you? How’s your wife? Oh, Bob, you kidder! We’ve so appreciated the support you’ve shown our cause over the years. Ha, you know me too well! Yes, I was of course calling to share some further startling statistics about violence, which, as you know, is epidemic, epidemic, epidemic….”

The allegory may be corny, but you get the point. This is how legislation is prompted, and support for it solidified and maintained. Names change; the message doesn’t.

Money has steadily aggregated to representatives of feminist causes over the decades, and this money has been used to secure public opinion through “information campaigns.” Too, it has inspired grant allocations to agencies of the justice system amounting to billions under the feminist motivated Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Federal grants are also issued to promote and fund social science that validates these expenditures and laws related to violence against women, including restraining order laws. Both money and this tailored research are used to influence police policy and condition judicial priorities.

Women, defensively, may deny that members of their sex instigate malicious prosecutions more often than men or to greater effect. Who lies and why doesn’t matter, though. Judges should be vigilant against false claims, which should be detected, dismissed, and punished. Judges aren’t vigilant, false claims aren’t detected, and their claimants aren’t sanctioned. Why?

Thanks to dogged and vehement feminist politicking for the past 30 years or more, standards for substantiating claims of abuse made by restraining order petitioners are none, and penalties for lying are none. That’s because (women, please note) if the law made the standards too demanding or it threatened penalties for iffy testimony—so the dated argument runs—abused women might be afraid to come forward. They would just “suffer in silence” instead.

To ensure abused women aren’t afraid to come forward—again, so the dated argument runs—allegations must be taken on faith, and judges must have complete latitude to rule as they “think best” to protect the interests of people who can’t protect themselves.

If all this wiggle room means some people (or a lot of people) get falsely implicated…so what?

Law follows politics, and the political fix has been in for a long time. It stays in, because the architecture of laws has been concrete-reinforced. Feminist advocates continue to “monitor public policy” and to maintain their painstakingly erected social webwork. They have the money to do it. Oppositional voices are neither bankrolled nor have any political cachet. They’re not just the underdogs; they’re the usual suspects.

The above makes the below possible (comment submitted to this blog a few days ago by “Rhonda Lynn”):

I’m going to court in a few hours. I haven’t slept or eaten, and I’m a wreck. My life is over. Today.

I fled a [domestic violence] situation in another state and moved back to Washington. I bounced around a bit and finally ended up renting a room. (I’m disabled, on Social Security.) Yes, Craigslist.

I felt I asked all the right questions: Are you married? Do you live on the property? Do you own the home? Who else lives there? Both [man and woman] were surprised to learn [I was disabled, because] the other tenants renting the room across from me were disabled, as well. The man of the [tenant] couple was deaf, and I know American Sign Language.

Upon moving in, I began noticing the lies being told. The disabled couple was made to turn over their food cards. They tried with me when I signed the month-to-month agreement. I, of course, declined.

I helped with the deaf man and his developmentally disabled woman, because the female “owner” (also a lie) was overwhelmed and claimed she was sick. I cooked and cleaned (28 loads of laundry, using the washer and dryer I brought from my previous residence). I paid for Thanksgiving dinner.

Then Hell came. A friend of the female claimed the “husband” had been coming on to her…long story. The next day, it was me! […] First she tells me to move out; then she’s my friend.

The exploitation of the couple continues. The sister of the deaf man calls me [and] then calls Adult Protective Services. I make a call as well. There is an active investigation.

Ready?

sign-languageThe police knock on my bedroom door and give me 10 minutes to get some clothes. The “husband-owner” filed a restraining order on me!

I had a couple stay overnight for a movie marathon the night before, so I had a bit of help. The female officer verified I had a lock for my room. She advised the petitioner no one was to enter my room. She had me turn over the house key. I was in shock, crying.

As we pull away, the “husband” sends me a voice recording…saying, “See…who got [who] out of whose house? I got you out of my house! Neener Neener.”

I called the police. No good. I am not the victim. I’m the perpetrator. While on the phone…two more [messages] telling me I’m not getting any more of my stuff back, can’t come back to the house…even with an officer. “You’re burnt bitch! If the police ask where’s your stuff, I’m gonna say I don’t know.”

Then, there’s the “order.” A Domestic Violence Protection Order!

The allegations, all false…and very damning: stealing his mail, opening it and not giving it to him, going in his wallet, taking his [Social Security] card and old i.d., shoving him into a wall, causing a bruise on his back, yelling at all hours of the day and night, causing such stress on the disabled couple that they can’t eat or sleep and have PTSD episodes, calling members of the house vulgar names, texting and calling everyone while they sleep, [threatening] to burn the house down, [warning] him not to sleep, because I’d kill him. [He alleges] he is in fear of his life, afraid to take a shower or come home.

Then, lastly, the night before (when I had company), [he says] I came at him with a kitchen knife as he was getting ready for work [and that] he tried to call the cops, and I took his cell phone away. Then gave it back that morning.

Oh, my lord!

They both went on my Facebook [page]. He called me a hooker, said I would sleep with any man, and called me a horrible name. I didn’t respond, of course. Then he said I do meth, [which] he knows because I lived with him and he cleaned my room and found pipes and bags. Then she responds and says…and rigs and baggies. Now we know [they say] why she cleaned, and it explains her treatment of us. He [wrote] in another post: “I just want everyone to know she does methamphetamines.” (He is in outpatient treatment.)

[…]

I call the police…to get my stuff. I left my daughter’s ashes and pictures.

They say, “How can you prove you live there? If he doesn’t say you live there, we won’t bust down the door.”

I’M GOING TO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE.
(BUT DON’T DRIVE AND NO BUS FARE)
PLEASE. HELP ME.
RHONDA

The reader may choose to indict the male accuser in Rhonda’s story instead of the apparatus he exploited because he could, or the reader may choose to indict the apparatus itself and those who inspired it, defend it, keep it well lubricated, profit from it, and convincingly deny it’s abused.

Neither position will help Rhonda, who may be broken forever (or until she finds a bridge), but one of them may eventually make it illegal for a life to be so viciously demeaned as hers has been.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“You have bullsh*t; we have research”: The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence v. Daddy Justice (Or, Why False Allegations Are a Serious Problem)

Moderator 10 Comments

A correspondent, friend, and fellow blogger who’s been relentlessly attacked through the courts by a disturbed neighbor (over a period now spanning years) sent a link to the YouTube vid “The Grand Poobah” last week. It’s a 2011 “interview” between men’s rights activist Ben Vonderheide (a.k.a. “Daddy Justice”) and Rita Smith, former executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), an influential Colorado-based nonprofit.

(Note: The word in the video’s title should be spelled “poohbah,” after a comic opera character whose name was probably formed from the interjections pooh + bah. Mr. Vonderheide’s spelling it “poobah” might have been an accident—or it might have been on purpose.)

The setting of the interview, which would more aptly be called an exchange of words, isn’t clear, but it seems to be a post-conference mix-and-mingle. Mr. Vonderheide takes issue with the NCADV’s feminine bias and the propagandist tenor of the factsheets it publishes, which aren’t uncommonly cited by feminist advocates.

As the quotation in this post’s title suggests, the questions he poses to Ms. Smith aren’t favorably received. Those questions regard the NCADV’s disinclination to acknowledge maternal child abuse (Ms. Smith: “It’s not our focus of work”), as well as its denial that false accusations of domestic violence are a serious problem, false accusations that Mr. Vonderheide alleges are “promoted by [the NCADV’s] budget.”

Daddy Justice’s interview style (à la Michael Moore) is obtrusive—he’s plainly crashed the party—but while Mr. Vonderheide is necessarily assertive, the worst you could say of his questions is that they’re confrontational. They’re nevertheless called “abusive” and “aggressive,” and he’s prodded to leave.

The grudging answers his questions prompt before he’s rebuffed don’t provide much informational grist for the mill, but to his allegation that more than 80% of restraining orders are based on false accusations, Ms. Smith significantly counters that her facts say it’s only “2% of the time” (and she urges Mr. Vonderheide to “stop lying”). Later she revises her estimate of the number of false accusations from 2% to “2 to 5%,” dismissively, despite the fact that if, say, 2,000,000 restraining orders are petitioned a year (and the total may be much higher), the extra 3% translates to the invasion, disruption, and possible dismantling of 60,000 innocent defendants’ lives, besides those of their children and others peripheral to the mischief.

A mere 5% false allegation rate means the victimization of 100,000 (or many more) innocent people per year (again, not including ambient casualties). Anecdotal reports, of course—including from judges and attorneys—put the false allegation rate 6 to 18 times higher than 5% (30 to 90%). It just depends who you’re asking.

Even a ridiculously conservative false allegation rate like the posited 5% plainly recommends legislative reform, because there’s absolutely no accountability in the restraining order process. False accusers aren’t punished, and damages from false allegations aren’t remediable by lawsuit. Additional false claims can what’s more be lodged almost immediately by the same accusers using the same process. There’s no statutory ceiling on the number of orders a single complainant may apply for. (Some victims of procedural abuse report spending tens of thousands of dollars to fend off one petition only to throw up their hands—and in cases forfeit their custody entitlements—when a second comes down the pike a few months later. See here for an example.)

It should be appreciated, too, that any audit-derived estimate of the number of false allegations can only be based on allegations that are recorded as false (by “somebody”). No official false allegation rate accounts for the number of times false allegations succeed or the number of times cases based on them are simply “dismissed” without comment.

In other words, false allegations may well be rampant or “epidemic” (a word favored by anti-domestic-violence advocates), and there would be no record that says so.

The nyah-nyah from the title—“We have research; you have bullshit”—deserves reflection, also. (It doesn’t come from Ms. Smith, incidentally, but from an unidentified confederate who can’t resist a Parthian shot at Mr. Vonderheide before she and the “Grand Poobah” turn their backs to him). The “research” that advocacy groups posit is survey-based, that is, it amounts to responses to questionnaires that are administered to sample groups and then extrapolated to the population as a whole. Even this survey data we must take on faith.

Appreciate that conducting “research” of this sort depends on means, which depend on money, which is only allocated to groups like the NCADV. Consider:

The NCADV’s reported income for 2011 was $643,797, down about $70,000 from the previous year. Ms. Smith’s salary was $74,586.

Among the programs toward which the NCADV’s 2011 budget was dedicated were “General Program – provides information to educate and inform the general public about domestic violence” ($240,991), “Public Policy – works in collaboration with other national organizations to affect societal response to domestic violence through public education and coalition building, monitors federal legislation, and contacts legislators regarding domestic violence issues” ($88,808), “Membership – publishes a newsletter and provides networking opportunities for individuals and organizations interested in the work to empower battered women and their children” ($67,607), “Child custody – provides resources, referrals and support to advocates working with victims of domestic violence involved in family court cases with their abusers also provides resources to victims, attorney, and family members when family court issues are present” ($97,402).

In contrast to the social largesse enjoyed by groups like the NCADV, no money is allocated for the administration of surveys to determine, for example, incident rates of depression, drug or alcohol abuse, stress-related injuries, or suicide proximal to being falsely accused; no surveys appraise the resulting lost earnings and assets; and no surveys attempt to measure the hits taken by health insurance providers as a result. Prognosis of the long-term consequences to the welfare and life prospects of injured children is, moreover, impossible. Worse, it’s not even considered, which casts rather a long shadow on the purported “mission” of groups like the NCADV to protect kids.

Clearly, that motive is context-specific.

Daddy Justice makes up for the lack of information his “interview” questions elicit with quotations interposed between snippets of footage. Here are some of them:

  • “Everyone knows restraining orders…are granted to virtually all who apply.” […] “In many cases, allegations of abuse are used for tactical advantage” (Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association).
  • “Restraining orders are now considered part of the ‘gamesmanship of divorce’” (Illinois Bar Journal, 2005).
  • “In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases” (American Journal of Public Health, May 2007).
  • “Women were slightly more likely than men to use one or more acts of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently” (Psychological Bulletin, 26, No. 5, pp. 651-680).
  • “Leading sociologists have repeatedly found that men and women commit violence at similar rates” (Law Professor Linda Kelly, 2003).
  • “More women than men engage in controlling behavior in their current marriages” (Violence and Victims, 22, Issue 4, 2007).
  • “Of all persons who suffer injuries from partner aggression, 38% are male” (Dr. John Archer, Psychological Bulletin).
  • “There is no doubt that this law [Ohio’s domestic violence statute] has been abused” (Judge Nadine Allen of Hamilton County, Ohio).
  • “Standards for proving abuse have been so relaxed that any man who stands accused is considered guilty” (Cheryl Hanna, William and Mary Law Review).
  • “Women are nine times more likely to report domestic violence than male victims” (National Family Violence Survey).
  • “85% of temporary restraining orders are filed against men” (Cathy Young, “Domestic Violence: An In-Depth Analysis,” 2005).
  • “Many judges view restraining orders as ‘a rubber-stamping exercise,’ and subsequently hearings are ‘usually a sham’” (Attorney Arnold Rutkin, Family Advocate, Winter 1996).
  • “The mere allegation of domestic violence may shift the burden of proof to the defendant” (Massachusetts Law Weekly, 1995).

Notable is that cited remarks from legal experts that categorically define the restraining order process as prejudiced, if not an outright abomination against rudimentary civil rights and principles of law, may be a decade or decades old. Rhetorical stances like the NCADV’s aren’t fooling anybody in the know, and they haven’t for a long time. But they continue to dominate political debate. They’re heeded because they’re supposed to be. Not coincidentally, women’s advocates hold the keys to the treasury.

The value of Mr. Vonderheide’s video, finally, isn’t in the information it educes or even the information it asserts but the psychological study it offers of the women behind the dogma and the sway they exercise on public perception. His questions, only impeachable as indelicate, inspire predictable reactions: antagonism, levity, or disdain.

According to tried and true method (a method both practiced and preached), the “self-reliant” feminist women who are the targets of Mr. Vonderheide’s questions register alarm. These deniers of false allegations and undue hysteria…call the police.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Daddy Justice’s videos can be found here.

Dust It Off: This Isn’t 1979, and It’s Time Restraining Order Laws Were Reconsidered

Moderator 8 Comments

I remarked to a commenter the other day that when I became a vegetarian in the ’80s, I was still a kid, and my family took it as an affront, which was a common reaction then. Today, everyone’s a vegetarian or “tried vegetarianism” or has “thought about becoming a vegetarian.” Other subjects that were outré or taboo in my childhood like atheism, cross-dressing, and depression—they’re no longer stigmatized, either (in the main). Gay people, who were only whispered about then, can marry in a majority of states. When I was a kid, it was shaming for bra straps or underpants bands to be visible. Today they’re exposed on purpose.

It’s a brave new world.

While domestic violence is no more comfortable a topic of conversation now than it was then, it’s also hardly hush-hush. When restraining orders were conceived, it was unmentionable, and that was the problem. It was impossible for battered women to reliably get help. They faced alienation from their families and even ridicule from the police if they summoned the courage to ask for it. They were trapped.

Restraining orders cut through all of the red tape and made it possible for battered women to go straight to the courthouse to talk one-on-one with a judge and get immediate relief. The intention, at least, was good.

It’s probable, too, that when restraining orders were enacted way back when, their exploitation was minimal. It wouldn’t have occurred to many people to abuse them, just as it wouldn’t have occurred to lawmakers that anyone would take advantage.

This isn’t 1979. Times have changed and with them social perceptions and ethics. Reporting domestic violence isn’t an act of moral apostasy. It’s widely encouraged.

No one has gone back, however, and reconsidered the justice of a procedure of law that omits all safeguards against misuse. Restraining orders circumvent investigation by police and the vetting of accusations by district attorneys. They allow individuals to prosecute allegations all on their own, trusting that those individuals won’t lie about fear or abuse, despite the fact that there are any number of compelling motives to do so, including greed/profit, spite, victim-playing, revenge, mental illness, personality disorder, bullying, blame-shifting, cover-up, infidelity/adultery, blackmail, coercion, citizenship, stalking, and the mere desire for attention.

Restraining orders laws have steadily accreted even as the original (problematic) blueprint has remained unchanged. Claims no longer need to be of domestic violence (though its legal definition has grown so broad as to be virtually all-inclusive, anyway). They can be of harassment, “stalking,” threat, or just inspiring vague unease.

These aren’t claims that are hard to manufacture, and they don’t have to be proved (and there’s no ascertaining the truth of alleged “feelings” or “beliefs,” anyway, just as there’s no defense against them). Due to decades of feminist lobbying, moreover, judges are predisposed to issue restraining orders on little or no more basis than a petitioner’s saying s/he needs one.

What once upon a time made this a worthy compromise of defendants’ constitutionally guaranteed expectation of due process and equitable treatment under the law no longer does. The anticipation of rejection or ridicule that women who reported domestic violence in the ’70s and ’80s faced from police, and which recommended a workaround like the restraining order, is now anachronistic.

Prevailing reflex from authorities has swiveled 180 degrees. If anything, the conditioned reaction to claims of abuse is their eager investigation; it’s compulsory policy.

Laws that authorize restraining order judges, based exclusively on their discretion, to impose sanctions on defendants like registry in public databases that can permanently foul employment prospects, removal from their homes, and denial of access to their kids and property are out of date. Their license has expired.

Besides material privations, defendants against allegations made in brief trips to the courthouse are subjected to humiliation and abuse that’s lastingly traumatic. Making false claims is a simple matter, and offering damning misrepresentations that don’t even depend on lies is simpler yet.

What shouldn’t be possible happens. A lot. Almost as bad is that we make believe it doesn’t.

Just as it was wrong to avert our eyes from domestic violence 30 years ago, it’s wrong to pretend that attempts to curb it since haven’t fostered new forms of taunting, terrorism, and torment that use the state as their agent.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Battering Women to Protect Battered Women: Using Massachusetts’s Policies to Examine Restraining Order Publicity and Its Damages

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“In the event a Restraining Order is issued for any period of time (initial 10 days or subsequent extension/dismissal), you will be listed in the statewide Domestic Violence Registry system. This could impact your ability to obtain or maintain employment in government, law enforcement, certain medical fields, or social services, or to work with/coach children. Impoundment of the restraining order does not expunge your listing on the statewide domestic violence registry, as certain government agencies and private companies with significant government contracts still have access to the registry system.”

—“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications”

I’ve just been corresponding with a Florida woman named Ally who had a domestic violence (209A) protection order petitioned against her in Massachusetts alleging she was a danger to a former boyfriend (these kinds of instruments can be obtained by plaintiffs who don’t even live in the same state or country as their defendants).

Ally contends the allegations against her are false and has been living in hell for over a year.

She’s surviving day to day and can’t afford to procure the services of an attorney. Ally’s trying to defend herself and clear her name with no money and from another time zone. She’s preparing a motion on her own (very possibly ill-fated) to request that the order against her be expunged, because it has ruined her employability.

Note: As the epigraph explains, even were Ally to succeed in having the order simply dismissed (which is itself unlikely), she would still remain registered as a domestic abuser.

From a draft of Ally’s “Motion to Expunge”:

Defendant was refused jobs, [is] not allowed to attend [or] volunteer [at] her daughter’s school events, [and has had] numerous other rights taken away due to Plaintiff’s Abuse of Process and Fraudulent Allegations and written Affidavit to the Court. This continues today.

Note: To successfully combat prosecutions like this requires money…which prosecutions like this prevent their defendants from earning.

A recent post on this blog observed the court’s schizophrenic regard toward restraining orders. On the one hand, they’re viewed by judges as urgent, potentially life-or-death matters; on the other hand, they’re viewed as inconsequential as long as defendants mind their prohibitions for the prescribed period of time.

Ignored is that adjudications both initiated and finalized in minutes yield rulings that are entered into state and national law enforcement databases indefinitely. Orders become “inactive” once they expire, but they don’t disappear. A woman like Ally remains for the rest of her life marked as a perpetrator of domestic violence.

In contrast—and the contrast is a telling one—consider this excerpt from a “Memoradum” issued by the Massachusetts Supreme Court last year on “Internet Dissemination of Personal Protection Order Information.”

As transparency and improved access remain court goals, it is important that we not unknowingly or unintentionally release victims’ personally identifiable information through the Internet, recognizing that this information is easily accessed and that access to such information could be dangerous to victims. Additionally, it has been brought to our attention that current federal law prohibits providing information over the Internet about personal protection orders (PPOs) that would be likely to reveal the identity or location of the petitioner (“PPO Information”).

18 USC 2265(d)(3) states:

A State, Indian tribe, or territory shall not make available publicly on the Internet any information regarding the registration, filing of a petition for, or issuance of a protection order, restraining order, or injunction in either the issuing or enforcing State, tribal or territorial jurisdiction, if such publication would be likely to publicly reveal the identity or location of the party protected under such order. A State, Indian tribe, or territory may share court-generated and law enforcement-generated information contained in secure, governmental registries for protection order enforcement purposes.

The privacy of restraining order plaintiffs (who are nominated “victims”) is to be tightly guarded.

Note: Based on “determinations” formed in minutes and possibly based on nothing more substantial than accusation, a plaintiff is deemed a “victim” whose identity and privacy must be protected, and the defendant is deemed a “violent threat” whose privacy is accordingly due no consideration. After the term of the restraining order has flown, the “danger” to the accuser is assumed to have been resolved, but the accuser continues to enjoy anonymity while the accused must go on bearing the implications of the restraining order for the rest of his or her life, exactly as if those implications were a criminal sentence.

Only in the recent past, in fact, did it even become possible to remove a Massachusetts restraining order defendant’s name from the domestic violence registry if it were found that allegations against him or her were substantially or totally false. (Remember that such allegations are made ex parte in the time it takes to place an order at McDonald’s.)

Until recently, it was almost impossible to expunge a person’s record with the domestic violence registry once the initial entry was made. In the 2006 case of Commissioner of Probation v. Adams, it was recognized that a judge has the inherent authority to expunge a record of an abuse [from the] violence registry system in the rare and limited circumstance that the judge finds the order was obtained through fraud on the court.

Note: The phrase rare…circumstance (of fraud) is emphasized in the original document quoted above (“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications”), which was authored by an all-female law firm (Mavrides Law of Boston). Allegations of rampant restraining order misuse in Massachusetts have actually been the subject of press coverage and at least one law review monograph, and one of the most outspoken critics of restraining orders, attorney Gregory Hession, practices in Massachusetts and has for many years reported that restraining orders are “out of control.”

The previous two posts on this blog were responses to allegations that those who criticize restraining orders and domestic violence laws are “opposed to the battered women’s movement.” Defenders of these laws are urged to ask themselves how Ally’s wanting to be able to provide for her daughter and one day attend her daughter’s graduation has anything to do with battered women at all.

They’re also urged to ask themselves how denying Ally these opportunities isn’t itself an act of brutality.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com