Tag public humiliation

The Rape Victim’s Trauma in Court Is the SAME Trauma Experienced by the Falsely Accused

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“[Tina] Renton still has nightmares about her time in the witness box. ‘During the day I can cope with it. In my sleep…. You can’t control your subconscious.’ She dreams of ‘running and never being able to find anyone able to help you’ and of ‘standing in court, people laughing at you, but you don’t know why.’”

—Amelia Gentleman, the Guardian (April 13, 2013)

Above are the words of a woman who was the prosecuting witness in the rape trial of her stepfather.

Below are the words of a man who was repeatedly accused by a prosecuting witness (his estranged wife and the mother of his children):

I couldn’t flee and I could not fight. I was never going to be allowed to heal or recover. I wish I were better at articulating the psychological and emotional trauma I experienced.

I could fill a book with all the lies and mysterious rulings of the Court. Never have I experienced this kind of pain. I asked for help, but good men did nothing and evil prevailed.

Correspondences between the man’s and woman’s statements are obvious, as are contrasts between the man’s and woman’s treatment under the law.

The woman prevailed in criminal court. She also authored a book. The man was hectored in family court until he killed himself, and his wife obtained a court order granting her the intellectual property rights to his final words, which she attempted to expunge from every nook and cranny of the Internet.

Tina Renton, quoted in the epigraph, accused her stepfather of “raping and assaulting her multiple times during her childhood,” and a jury found him guilty. The trauma Ms. Renton describes, however, isn’t the residue of being physically violated by a parental figure years before; it’s the aftereffect of being psychologically violated in court.

She defended herself and was taunted and denounced as a liar.

“It is hard being accused of being a liar,” she says. “I would never have put myself through the trauma of a court case if it wasn’t true.”

Her stepfather was sentenced to 14 years. Still Ms. Renton reports having nightmares about her experiences in court, and certainly no feminist is going to contradict her claim of trauma.

Why, then, are feminists the most adamant critics of those who allege they’ve been falsely vilified or persecuted in civil and family court (where there is no standard of proof)? Is it reasonable to argue that being falsely called a “liar” is more traumatic than being falsely called a “stalker,” “wife batterer,” “child abuser,” or worse? If feminists understand the trauma described by Tina Renton and sympathize with it, why are they the most unyielding obstacle to reform of restraining order and domestic violence laws that make false accusation easy and rewarding? Ms. Renton, a woman, very plausibly says she was caused lasting injury by being falsely accused of lying. Yet some feminists assert that a man’s being falsely accused of rape is insignificant. How is this not only hypocritical but heinous?

When it’s asserted that rape victims face “being raped all over again” in court, what’s meant is that they face being lied about, misrepresented, defamed, badgered, and shamed. They face, in sum, being falsely accused.

This is compared to being raped.

It must be appreciated that those falsely accused in civil or family court (women among them) are traumatized by exactly the same treatment (including by their judges), and many of them may also have been abused by their accusers, including violently. Moreover, the abuse they receive in and from the court may be aggravated (exorbitantly) by having their children taken from them, being cast out of their homes, and/or being forced to pay their false accusers’ living expenses.

Feminists seem to have no difficulty imagining the psychic scars caused to rape victims by being denounced and disparaged in criminal court.

For feminists to identify with complainants of false accusation in civil and family court, then, they need only imagine what it would feel like for those rape victims to be forced to surrender all they value to their abusers and pay them for the privilege of being lied about and publicly humiliated.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The quoted Guardian story includes a case of a woman who prevailed in court but nevertheless committed suicide. “Her son, Oliver, told a newspaper how profoundly the cross-examination had affected her.”

Inciting Violence: If Lawmakers Require a Compelling Motive for Restraining Order Reform, How about This One?

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I examined a case, recently, of a man’s committing murder hours after being accused to the police. My familiarity with the case was, admittedly, shallow; I only had what was reported to go on (and that from a single, “raw” source). I have, however, heard from scores of people who’ve been accused—or scorned for telling the truth—in drive-thru restraining order proceedings, and expressions of fury have been more than a few.

This week, I shared an email by a highly educated, professional woman and mother of three young children that expresses an “almost homicidal enmity” catalyzed by procedural abuses. Note the elevated diction she uses to describe an impulse to bash, throttle, and gouge. Does her vaulted language indicate she “doesn’t really mean it”? No, it indicates how alien rage is to her character. It indicates she’s someone who shouldn’t have cause to feel this way.

Consider: How is it the police and the courts recognize the propensity for violence that interpersonal conflicts mediated by the “justice system” may arouse, but lawmakers don’t? Are they that “in the dark”?

Yeah, pretty much.

If you get into a spat with your neighbor, and the police intervene, parties are separated into corners. In court, complainants even merely of “fear” may be shielded by law officers in anticipation of a judicial ruling. It’s understood that emotions run hot in this theater.

Why, then, is it not appreciated that when the basis for rulings is false, the risk of violence is not only higher but infinite?

We like our games, and we like our fictions about how people should be and should feel and should react even if you trash their lives maliciously. Hey, we’re disposed to remind, it’s the law.

All well and good until somebody gets an ax in the ear—an edgy remark, maybe; honesty often strikes us that way (i.e., like an ax in the ear).

The wonder is that more people who lie to the courts don’t meet premature ends—or at least sustain some anatomical remodeling. False accusations, which have inspired a great deal of sententious deliberation in recent months, don’t just “discomfort” people or make them “justifiably [and transiently] angry.” At the risk of being edgy again: People who haven’t been falsely accused in a legal procedure don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I was collegiately trained as a literary analyst—I’ve studied and taught Victorian literature—and I’m normally more disciplined in my remarks, but this subject rebukes gentility.

Liars maim. That they do it with words in no way mitigates the brutality of the act or its consequences.

One would think that as people mature and progress through life, that they would stop behaviors of their youth. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sadly, adults can be bullies, just as children and teenagers can be bullies. While adults are more likely to use verbal bullying as opposed to physical bullying, the fact of the matter is that adult bullying exists. The goal of an adult bully is to gain power over another person, and make himself or herself the dominant adult. They try to humiliate victims, and “show them who is boss” (BullyingStatistics.org, “Adult Bullying”).

StopBullying.gov defines bullying as including name-calling, taunting, threatening, spreading rumors about someone, and embarrassing someone in public. Falsely labeling someone a stalker, child abuser, violent danger, or sexual deviant in one or more public trials whose findings are impressed on the target’s permanent record and are accompanied by menacing threats (if not immediate punishment) plainly qualifies. Among identified effects of bullying are suicide (“bullycide”) and violence, including murder. “Extreme emotional disturbance” is a defense for murder in some states (a finding that doesn’t excuse the act but does lighten the sentence), and a related murder defense is “provocation.”

Sure, character assassination is bloodless. What of it? If I circulate lies about someone and s/he snaps, I’m a bully, and I had it coming. Few people would say otherwise.

Ah, but if I lie and use the law as my medium to insult, demean, badger, intimidate, or otherwise persecute—hey, that’s different. I’m the “good guy.”

So suck it. And keep on sucking it, because the public record says my lies are the truth. Neener-neener.

A system that represents its purpose to be the curtailment of violence shouldn’t be promoting it by pandering to bullies, even “unofficially,” and its officers shouldn’t be serving as those bullies’ lieutenants and enforcers. If the system makes it easy to lie about and humiliate people, doesn’t hold liars accountable, and furthermore punishes the falsely accused based on lies, then it’s promoting violence.

This shouldn’t require social science research to corroborate. It shouldn’t even require this analyst’s observation.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

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

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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

“Fag,” “Stalker,” “Sicko,” “Brute,” “Creep”: On Labeling and the Psychic Effects of Public Revilement in and out of Court

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One of my favorite puzzles when I was a boy directed the solver to figure out what was different between almost identical pictures. I think it appeared in Highlights for Children. I have a collection of Highlights someplace, because I meant to write for kids and used to study and practice children’s writing daily, but I haven’t looked at them in years.

I’m reminded of this, because, as you might have discerned, one among the epithets in this post’s title is distinct from the others: fag.

When I was growing up, I knew a very simple boy who was singled out at an early age—nine or thereabouts—and routinely ridiculed by the “cool” boys at school. Some girls occasionally joined in, too, albeit half-heartedly, to curry favor with boys they wanted to like them. “Fag!” or “Faggot!” was a favored insult among schoolboys. No other had anything close to its heft as a term of contempt to pierce a man-child to the bone.

The boy I’m recalling happened to be Polish, and Polack was a competing term of derision that might have conveniently been used to hurt him. It didn’t rouse nearly as much pack frenzy, though. His name started with F, besides, so its pairing with fag was poetic kismet. “Fag!” followed this boy from grade to grade like a toxic echo. It was how he was greeted, and he would sometimes mince, affect limp wrists, and swipe at the other boys, because it amused them and won him attention and the closest thing to membership he could hope for.

The boy wasn’t gay; he was just easy meat to sate the bloodlust of cruel kids.

The last time I saw him was when I was a young adult. He was panhandling outside of a drugstore for diaper money. He’d apparently gotten a girl pregnant right out of high school to prove his virility. The abuses to which he’d been relentlessly subjected determined the arc of his life.

I relate this story in the context of restraining order abuse to highlight the grave effects of public humiliation and revilement. Labeling of this sort isn’t just tormenting and alienating but destructive. It corrupts the mind, silently and sinuously. It confounds ambitions, erodes trust, and hobbles lives.

Victims of false allegations made on restraining orders may be labeled “stalker,” “batterer,” “sicko,” “sexual harasser,” “child-abuser,” “whore,” or even “rapist”—publicly and permanently—by accusers whose sole motive is to brutalize. And agents of these victims’ own government(s) arbitrarily authorize this bullying and may baselessly and basely participate in it, compounding the injury exponentially.

I’ve been contacted by people who’ve either been explicitly or implicitly branded with one or several of these labels. Falsely and maliciously. I’ve been branded with more than one myself, and these epithets have been repeatedly used with and among people I don’t even know. For many years. Even at one of my former places of work. And there’s f* all I can do about it, legally.

Labels like these, even when perceived as false by judges, aren’t scrupulously scrubbed away. Resisting them, furthermore, simply invites the application of more of the same. Judges’ turning a blind eye to them, what’s more than that, authorizes their continuously being used with impunity, as the boys in the story I shared used the word fag. Victims of false allegations report being in therapy, being on meds for psychological disturbances like depression and insomnia, leaving or losing jobs—sometimes serially—and entertaining homicidal thoughts and even acting on suicidal ones.

No standard of proof is applied to labels scribbled or check-marked on restraining orders, which to malicious accusers are the documentary equivalents of toilet stalls begging for graffiti.

That the courts may only enable bullying, taunting, and humiliation is no defense, nor is “policy.” Adding muscle to malice is hardly blameless. Anyone occupying a position of public trust who abets this kind of brutality, actively or passively, knowingly or carelessly, should be removed, whether a judge, a police officer, or other government official, agent, or employee.

This hateful misconduct is bad enough when it originates on the playground.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

If You’re not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem: On Why Restraining Order Abuses Have Persisted for So Long and How to Do Something about It

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“Men are bastards!”

“Women are cun[ning]!”

I could end this editorial here, and I would have summed up the problem, which originates with hearts but owes its infinitude to different organs entirely.

Predictably, since most restraining orders are sought against a member of the opposite sex, online forums about dirty divorces, domestic abuse, treacherous lovers, vengeful exes, predatory or parasitic whackjobs, etc. often boil down to cross-gender sniping and “team camaraderie.” Women just want to be pissed with men and bitch about them with other women, and men just want to be pissed with women and bitch about them with other men.

Both genders have limitless potential to suck; sex is beside the point.

Those who profit politically and monetarily by the misery inflicted through court processes that are easily abused by the “morally unencumbered” love all this conflict and misdirected rage, which only ensure that these corrupt processes continue to thrive.

They’ve already hummed along without a hitch for over 30 years. In fact, they’ve gained momentum, despite reasoned and articulately critical pans from distinguished members of the legal, journalistic, academic/philosophic, and public policy communities.

Not only does cross-gender bitching by victims of state abuses distract from the actual source of the problem, which is bad laws; it makes those victims sound like the cranks and nuts everyone else is glad to assume they are.

True, the person who betrayed you and lied about you should be subjected to medieval punishment. True, the judge you got may be worthy of the same for his or her cruelty or carelessness or cluelessness. But…the reason either was entitled to abuse and humiliate, rob and defame you was THE LAW.

Except for the statutes that authorized your injuries, those injuries wouldn’t have been possible.

Passive aggression isn’t going to accomplish anything. I can’t imagine venting even makes anyone feel better for very long.

Aggressive aggression holds a lot more promise. If you’ve been wronged, tell your story, and tell it in a way that will count. Sign a petition and add a comment about your own circumstances. You don’t even have to expose your name. Sign several and tweet them, too (a few are below). Start a petition of your own. Tweet that also and post it here. Start a Facebook page. Connect and consolidate forces.

STOP FALSE ALLEGATIONS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

THE SUPREME COURT: FEATHER FOR THE FALSELY ACCUSED

RESTRAINING ORDER LAWS ARE DANGEROUS AND UNFAIR TO MEN

This may seem unthinkable to you, especially if your wounds are fresh, but appreciate that the impulse to conceal shame only potentiates that shame. If you’ve been wronged, the shame isn’t yours. Re-channel your emotions in constructive ways. You’re not alone.

No one wants to do this. No one should have to. I wanted to write humor for kids. Though not a big dream, it contented me, and I think I would have been successful at it by now and that other doors would have opened. I was dragged from my interior world and away from the life I might have enjoyed. Not only am I not a political person; I don’t even like board games.

I do, though, hate bullies, especially ones with gangs behind them.

Recognize that the ringleader of the gang that assaulted you isn’t that petty lowlife you mistakenly invested your trust in; he’s an invisible man who’s represented in posters wearing red, white, and blue, and his gang is everybody.

The only way you can beat him and attain some satisfaction is by taking away his gang and making it yours.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com