motives | TALKING BACK to restraining orders

A couple of recent female respondents to this blog have evinced a misconception about what restraining orders are and how sternly they’re enforced, and my suspicion is this misunderstanding is prevalent and may account for much of the incredulity expressed by the general public when they hear restraining orders are abused or sought for malicious ends.

Restraining orders, which are casually issued by the court, are popularly understood as harmless instruments, that is, ones merely intended to check their recipients’ conduct and only serious if not taken seriously. Plaintiffs may even have the impression that restraining orders are simply warnings issued by authorities to make someone (a boyfriend, for example) clean up his act and that, according to their applicants’ discretion, may be disregarded.

Wrong.

Civil injunctions aren’t warnings; they’re orders of the court. If violated, even by the express invitation of their plaintiffs—and if the search terms that bring people to this blog are any indication (and they are), this happens more than anyone cares to acknowledge—the consequences to their defendants may be extreme, including months of incarceration, loss of employment, and all of the possible ramifications (physical, psychological, and material) that attend both. Police won’t inquire whether renewed relations between a plaintiff and a defendant were consensual, nor will they care. They’ll just slap the cuffs on, and the situation isn’t one that an ill-informed plaintiff can simply “clear up.” It’s out of his or her hands. It’s sufficient, furthermore, for an officer to reasonably believe a violation has occurred. No report by the plaintiff is required to authorize an arrest.

The popular conception of restraining orders as “advisories” that are meant to temporarily put someone on notice is mistaken. Restraining orders are public records that never cease to be public records; may be grounds for dismissal from jobs, as well as impediments to future employment; may be recorded in public registries; and provide authorities with grounds to summarily arrest their defendants and possibly incarcerate them for a considerable period.

Here you see the perceptual schism between what may seem to many applicants (and most disinterested citizens) to be simple expedients to attain relief from a nuisance and what are actually very draconian instruments easily and potently abused by unscrupulous plaintiffs. Restraining orders aren’t color-coded according to “threat level.” They’re generic documents. The average person may genuinely fail to recognize that the measure that stops someone from sending tedious letters is the same one that may strip a defendant of his or her home, children, money, property, and livelihood—very possibly on fraudulent grounds.

The latter scenario, it’s believed, only occurs when real and urgent circumstances exist to justify it, real and urgent circumstances that are diligently ascertained by the courts. Irrespective of the allegations made or the purpose indicated by a plaintiff, in fact, restraining orders are issued based on cursory interviews that require no evidence at all. And they’re as easily and conveniently obtained by the malicious as they are by the earnest—indeed more easily, because malicious accusers are indifferent to lying.

Though it may be the case that restraining orders are perceived as in-structive, they may well be de-structive. Sometimes destruction is the motive of their applicants, but this result occurs even when it’s unintended.

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.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag motives

Restraining Orders Aren’t FOR Their Applicants but AGAINST Their Recipients: On the Gravity of Civil Injunctions

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