Inconvenient statistics have been cited in support of restraining order reform for many years, statistics like 8 in 10 restraining orders are obtained either on dubious grounds or downright fraudulent ones. This stat, drawn from a West Virginia study, was formerly cited on Wikipedia but has since been quashed. Unnecessarily, probably. Restraining order injustice is hardly a topic of broad public concern. Statistics like this are mainly cited among its victims—and to little or no effect.

Bruiting stats of this kind is sort of like throwing rocks at a tank.

The restraining order process has, over the last three decades, spawned a behemoth institution that spans not only the United States but much of the globe. Entire cottage industries have evolved around it. Restraining order administration entails not only court officers and staff but police, social workers, employees of women’s shelters, attorneys and their retinues, therapists, and many others. Livelihoods have come to depend on its perpetuation. And the volume of restraining orders issued ensures that public funds (in the billions in this country alone) continue to be dedicated to raising social awareness and sensitizing authorities and judges to violence against women. These funds go to sustaining additional swathes of Justice Department employees and advocacy groups and further guarantee that the number of restraining orders issued continues to grow, despite the fact that violence is seldom alleged on restraining order applications at all.

Critics of restraining orders are ragtag revolutionaries, often with very divergent motives. Some oppose reverse discrimination, some advocate for fathers’ rights or preservation of the family, some denounce violations of civil liberties.

Those most dramatically impacted by restraining order abuse, its victims, are typically only heard to peep and grumble here and there.

It’s their stories, though, that speak most persuasively to the need for restraining order reform. Pointing out the inconsistency, illogic, unfairness, and indecency of how restraining orders are administered is of limited value, because no one who hasn’t been victimized by the process has any urgent cause to care. And legislative interest is only aroused when a majority of constituents recognize a need for change and clamor for it.

Since I began this blog in the summer of 2011, I’ve learned a good deal about the manifold ways people prey on and injure one another. And having been collegiately trained as an analyst, I’ve noted and could reveal to you any number of themes that run through abuses of restraining orders.

Far more compelling, though, are the individual stories that respondents to this blog have shared. Here are some of them in digest form:

• a man whose ex-wife is an attorney is serially pelted with restraining orders, because he’s remarrying, and his ex-wife jealously doesn’t want their kids to attend the ceremony and hopes, besides, to drive off the fiancée;
• a young, female attorney’s career ambitions are derailed when she’s served an emergency restraining order by an older, male colleague who seduced her while concealing he was married and didn’t want the fact getting back to his missus;
• a daughter is served a restraining order to deny her access to her paralyzed and dying mother by her father, an attorney, who verbally tormented her for decades and turned a blind eye to her brothers’ physically abusing her for the same period;
• a former city official (a vegetarian single mom) is accused of domestic violence by a high school boyfriend she briefly renewed a Platonic friendship with decades later who had a very jealous wife;
• a man is forced to dismantle his entire life, following his being charged with battery after he caught his wife texting her lover, and the two wrestled for possession of the phone for an hour;
• a young woman is served with restraining orders petitioned from two separate jurisdictions by her ex-boyfriend in retaliation for her dumping him;
• a grandma is served a restraining order by her former daughter-in-law because the latter is jealous of her sons’ affections for their nana;
• a 20-year-old college student is served an emergency restraining order by her counselor, alleging stalking and danger, because the girl encountered her a few times in public (in a town of 2,000 residents) and said hi.

And that’s just a handful off the top of my head. (Browse this online petition for thousands more.)

What should be evident from these accounts is that the popular paradigm of restraining orders being issued to men who chronically beat their wives while in a drunken haze is a disco-era cardboard caricature badly warped with age that’s only rescued from crumpling by the vast number of people with an investment in preserving an outdated impression.

Beneath all the statistics and all legal and Constitutional arguments aside, the restraining order process cries for reform, because the lives of ordinary, decent people are being unjustly destroyed by it.

It’s really that simple.

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