STINKIEST: Most Restraining Orders Are Sought Impulsively, if Not Maliciously

March 29, 2015June 21, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

“The first question for a legislature is whether to enact a civil harassment law at all. One thing is certain: If a civil harassment statute is enacted, it will be used—a lot. In 2003, Oklahoma reimposed a relationship requirement on its civil harassment statute because metropolitan counties were ‘being overrun with requests for protective orders.’”

—Prof. Aaron Caplan, “Free Speech and Civil Harassment Orders” (2013)

“The measure [House Bill 1667]:

Limits VPOs [“victim protective orders”] for harassment to situations in which the victim is being harassed by a family or household member or a person with whom the victim has been involved in a dating relationship. This provision is meant to reduce the number of frivolous applications for VPOs;
Requires victims of stalking who are not family or household members or in a dating relationship with the alleged stalker to file a complaint against the defendant with the proper law enforcement agency prior to filing for a VPO. The victim must provide a copy of the complaint with the petition for the VPO. This is also being done in an effort to reduce the number of frivolous applications for VPOs […].”

—Highlights of Legislation (49th Oklahoma Legislature, 2003)

As law professor and former ACLU staff attorney Aaron Caplan all but says, restraining orders are exploited. The 49th Oklahoma Legislature cited in Mr. Caplan’s law monograph explicitly implies the same thing. The purpose of its 2003 HB 1667 was to “reduce the number of frivolous applications.” This clearly wouldn’t have been a concern if there weren’t a great number of frivolous applications.

Frivolous means “having no sound basis.” Its vernacular synonym is bullshit.

The preceding two posts on this blog examine how many restraining orders are either rejected by the court (“tossed”) or withdrawn by petitioners after they succeed in securing them. Available news reports indicate most restraining orders are rejected outright or dismissed upon a “full hearing.” Most. Indications, too, are that a lot that aren’t rejected are later withdrawn by the people who petitioned them. A lot.

This alone is reason to suspect the motives of complainants and the merits of their complaints. Certainly it says judges do. As the epigraph reveals, legislators do, too.

Consternating to people whose lives have been derailed by false accusations is that the problem has been vigorously exposed and criticized for decades, and judges, lawmakers, and attorneys know those criticisms are more than hot air.

Yet little changes…including rhetoric that legislators know is misleading (stinky).

Look at the second quotation in the epigraph. First, note that the civil harassment orders that were repealed by HB 1667 were called “victim protective orders” (i.e., reflect on the absurdity of the phrase victim protective orders for harassment). Also note the acknowledgment that a significant proportion of petitions for “victim protective orders” are “frivolous.” Orders that may have nothing to do with violence are called “victim protective orders” and—and—they’re acknowledged to be used falsely, or at least wrongly (and to such an extent that legislative revision was urged).

Applicants for orders that are acknowledged to be used frivolously, however, are nevertheless called “victims.” (As the previous post shows, journalists collude in this misrepresentation.)

Recognized non-victims who clog court dockets with illegitimate claims are still called victims. Cases recognized as non-violent are still characterized as violent. When bias is this manifestly rooted, is it really that hard to believe that many or most orders that are approved and finalized may be malicious? The “fix” is obvious—it’s obvious—so how hard can “frames” or “set-ups” be to pull off?

Much ink has been spilled by opponents of the restraining order process desperate to arouse awareness to false allegations and prejudiced practices. People are issued restraining orders with fraudulent accusations that stick. They lose their jobs, homes, money, property, and good names. They lose access to their kids, who may come to hate them based on lies. Some may end up on the streets; some may even kill themselves in despair after being bullied and ground down, possibly for years.

False allegations that are rejected by the courts aren’t called false, yet false accusations that aren’t rejected by the courts are invariably called true (or “true enough”). The entire system reeks to high heaven.

How often false allegations succeed can’t be statistically established. Victims are left with having to lay out their cases in blogs and YouTube vids, or voicing four-letter epithets in Internet forums—or just quietly going mad.

This has inspired a great deal of rage and arguably more than a few deaths (suicides and murders), and that rage has inspired vehement denunciations from legions of special interest groups.

What all of this distracts from, though, is that explicitly manifest in judicial rulings and legislative reforms is that the court itself recognizes that false—or at least “frivolous” or “baseless”—claims are made more often than not.

Most restraining order petitions are rejected. Put more emphatically, theirs are considered to be bullshit claims.

What must be appreciated, finally, is that the restraining order process is a highly “accelerated” one (as Prof. Caplan, quoted in the epigraph, notes in his study). The conceptual justifications are that (1) applicants are “in danger” and need immediate relief, and (2) restraining orders are “no big deal.” The latter is refuted by rates of depression and suicide (or would be if they were they known), and the former is refuted by a preponderance of court rulings.

Unanticipated by lawmakers (apparently though inexplicably) is that an accelerated process rewards impulse, including malicious impulse. It’s exploited in heat, completed in moments, and usually free (and there’s no statutory limit imposed upon the number of times a single petitioner may exploit it).

Why do judges determine most restraining order petitioners’ claims are bullshit? That’s why.

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

February 12, 2015June 25, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

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.

Judicial Impression Management: What Makes False Allegations “True” and True Allegations “False” (and Drives Victims of Procedural Abuses to Despair)

December 11, 2014April 7, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

“Politics, corporate bullshit—it’s all the same game of impression management.”

—House of Lies

What do political spin-doctoring, corporate PR, government-sponsored science, and judicial rulings have in common?

Each is about impression management, the selective representation of facts to create a composite “truth” that suits a particular set of social, political, and/or economic imperatives.

Pols and corporations engage in flimflam to win votes and increase profit shares. Science, too, seeks acclaim and profit, and judicial motives aren’t so different. Judges know what’s expected of them, and they know how to interpret information to satisfy expectations.

The general context of discussions on this blog is the issuance of restraining orders, an arena of law that receives little scrutiny either from within the system or from the public; there is no oversight. Judges are moreover licensed to rule according to their discretion, so their latitude for impression management is broad. Any set of facts or plausible fictions can be rendered damning with a little rhetorical footwork, which needn’t be subtle—skewed rulings more often suggest clog dancing than ballet.

Nobody’s paying attention anyhow, except to make sure judges are fulfilling their mandate to make government look good and keep special interest groups mollified.

Since judges can rule however they want, and since they know that very well, they don’t even have to lie, per se, just massage the facts a little. It’s all about which facts are emphasized and which facts are suppressed, how select facts are interpreted, and whether “fear” can be reasonably inferred from those interpretations. A restraining order ruling can only be construed as “wrong” if it can be demonstrated that it violated statutory law (or the source that that law must answer to: the Constitution). There are no “mistakes,” only the very exceptional “over-reach.”

The restraining order process is the product of lobbying by special interest groups (collectively called “feminism”), which have secured government favor in recent decades, and this favor has conditioned how judges manage impressions. Favoring special interest groups has translated into the investment of billions, which has directed trends in social science research (including monetarily), swayed public opinion, and besides conditioned police and judicial impulses and priorities, thereby determining how allegations ranging from harassment to violent and/or sexual assault are credited and acted upon by officers of the justice system.

A crude evolutionary précis (not necessarily chronological) might look something like this:

Feminism gets the nod;
legislation is passed enacting restraining orders;
further legislation is passed making them more stringent and punitive;
additional legislation is passed: domestic violence acts and statutes, stalking statutes, etc.;
the definition of “domestic violence” is broadened to be inclusive of almost anything that can be construed as “abusive” according to judicial discretion;
the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is passed;
a special office of the Justice Department is established;
billions of dollars of federal monies are doled out in the form of grants to police departments and the courts to beef up arrest policies and “train” judges and police officers how to interpret allegations of violence or merely “fear”;
and the popular press is enlisted, knowingly or not, to flak the whole business.

Impression management marks the standard operating procedure from top to bottom.

Feminism’s foot soldiers in the blogosphere and on social media, finally, spread the “good word,” and John and Jane Doe believe what they’re told—unless or until they’re torturously disabused of their illusions. Stories like those you’ll find here are often the stories of average people who’ve been publicly maligned and have maddeningly discovered that “the truth” is whatever the system chooses to enter into the record.

To conclude this abstract litany with a concrete illustration, consider these stories, published six months apart (“Son of Whitestown judge charged with animal cruelty” and “Judge’s son pleads guilty to taping kitten ‘inhumanely’”):

The difference you’ll detect between the two versions of the facts and how they’re interpreted exemplifies impression management.

“Predator” v. “Porn Star”: Restraining Order Fraud, False Allegations, and Suing for Defamation

October 26, 2014June 21, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

People falsely alleged to be abusers on restraining order petitions, particularly men, are treated like brutes, sex offenders, and scum by officers of the court and its staff, besides by authorities and any number of others. Some report their own relatives remain suspicious—often based merely on finger-pointing that’s validated by some judge in a few-minute procedure (and that’s when relatives aren’t the ones making the false allegations).

The social alienation and emotional distress felt by the falsely accused may be both extreme and persistent.

The urge to credit accusations of abuse has been sharpened to a reflex in recent decades by feminist propaganda and its ill begot progeny, the Violence Against Women Act. No one thinks twice about it.

Using four-letter words in court is strictly policed. Even judges can’t do it without risking censure. Falsely implicating someone, however, as a stalker, for example, or a child molester—that isn’t policed at all. Commerce in lies, whether by accusers, their representatives, or even judges themselves is unregulated. No one is answerable for sh* s/he makes up.

Accordingly, false allegations and fraud are rewarding and therefore commonplace.

It should be noted that false allegations and fraud can be distinctly different. For example, David Letterman famously had a restraining order petitioned against him by a woman who was seemingly convinced he was communicating to her through her TV, and her interpretations of his “coded messages” probably were genuinely oppressive to her. David Letterman lived in another state, had never met her, and assuredly had no idea who she was. Her allegations of misconduct weren’t true, but they weren’t intended to mislead (and the fact that they did mislead a judge into signing off on her petition only underscores the complete absence of judicial responsibility in this legal arena).

Fraud, in contrast, is manipulative and deceptive by design. It occurs when an accuser intentionally lies (or spins the facts) to give a false impression and steer a judge toward a wrong conclusion that serves the interests of the fraudster.

Regardless, though, of whether false allegations are made knowingly or unknowingly, they’re rarely discerned as false by the court, are seldom acknowledged as false even if recognized as such, and are always destructive when treated as real, urgent, and true, which they commonly are.

The falsely accused (often private citizens who’ve never had a prior brush with the law) are publicly humiliated and shamed, which by itself is predictably traumatizing. They are besides invariably (and indefinitely) entered into police databases, both local and national, and may be entered into one or more domestic violence registries, too (also indefinitely). These facts pop up on background checks, and defendants in some states may even appear in registries accessible by anyone (including friends, neighbors, family members, boy- and girlfriends, employers, colleagues, students, patients, and/or clients).

This costs the falsely accused leases, loans, and jobs (being turned down for which, of course, aggravates the gnawing indignity and outrage they already feel). Those falsely accused of domestic violence may further be prohibited from attending school functions or working with or around children (permanently). Defendants of false restraining orders may besides be barred from their homes, children, assets, and possessions. Some (including salaried, professional men and women) are left ostracized and destitute. Retirees report having to live out of their cars.

This, remember, is the result of someone’s lodging a superficial complaint against them in a procedure that only requires that the accuser fill out some paperwork and briefly talk to a judge. A successful fraud may be based on nothing more substantive, in fact, than five “magic” words: “I’m afraid for my life” (which can be directed against anyone: a friend, a neighbor, an intimate, a spouse, a relative, a coworker—even a TV celebrity their speaker has never met).

This incantation takes a little over a second to utter (and its speaker, who can be a criminal or a mental case, need not even live in the same state as the accused).

Accordingly, people’s names and lives are trashed—and no surprise if they become unhinged. (Those five “magic” words, what’s more, may be uttered by the actual abusers in relationships to conceal their own misconduct and redirect blame. That includes, for example, stalkers. Those “magic” words may also be used to cover up any nature of other misbehavior, including criminal. They instantly discredit anything the accused might say about their speakers.)

The prescribed course of action to redress slanders and libels is a defamation suit, but allegations of defamation brought by those falsely accused on restraining orders or in related prosecutions are typically discounted by the court. Perjury (lying to the court) can’t be prosecuted by a private litigant (only by the district attorney’s office, which never does), and those who allege defamation are typically told the court has already ruled on the factualness of the restraining order petitioner’s testimony and that it can’t be reviewed (the facts may not even be reviewed by appellate judges, who may only consider whether the conduct of the previous judge demonstrated “clear abuse of discretion”). The plaintiff’s testimony, they’re told, is a res judicata—an already “decided thing.” (Never mind that docket time dedicated to the formation of that “decision” may literally have been a couple of minutes.)

So…slanders and libels made by abuse of court process aren’t actionable, slanders and libels that completely sunder the lives of the wrongly accused, who can’t even get them expunged from their records to simply reset their fractured lives to zero.

Such slanders and libels may include false allegations of stalking, physical or sexual aggression, assault, child abuse, or even rape. In the eyes of the court, someone’s being falsely implicated as a monster, publicly and for life, is no biggie.

In contrast, it was reported last month that the court awarded a Kansas woman $1,000,000 in a defamation suit brought against a radio station that falsely called her a “porn star.”

When violated people speak of legal inequities, this exemplifies what they’re talking about: Falsely and publicly implicating someone as a sex offender is fine and no grounds for complaint in the eyes of the justice system, but for the act of falsely and publicly calling someone a mere sex performer, someone may be fined a million bucks.

How It Serves Political Interests to Issue Restraining Orders Falsely

October 21, 2014February 27, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

Under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), some $10 billion has been invested over the past 20 years in procedures meant to redress violence against women, and restraining orders are the centerpiece of a host of related legislative measures.

The truth is restraining orders can’t prevent violence; they’re just pieces of paper. Their only value is rhetorical (they influence). They put defendants on notice, and they make it look like the government is protecting people.

When defendants are falsely blamed, their (isolated) protests are seldom registered or credited by others. Because their complaints are discounted or disregarded, they don’t tarnish the court’s image or inspire the press to investigate.

At the same time, it serves the court’s interests when defendants are falsely blamed. The greatest likelihood that an order of the court will appear to have averted violence is realized when that order is issued to someone who was never a threat at all.

Put another way, if the court only issued restraining orders to volatile people, it’s a fair bet that a discomforting percentage of orders would be violated, and the negative statistics would urgently disclose their ineffectiveness as deterrents.

Issuing a majority of restraining orders to people who pose little or no violent threat, contrariwise, ensures violations will be fewer and less consequential by and large. Negative figures, like murders, are thereby minimized, and the process appears to live up to its promise of insulation.

All of this is to say that if you issue 60 restraining orders against nonviolent people to every one issued against a violent aggressor, violations of restraining orders resulting in injuries or death will be comparatively few respective to the total number of people “restrained.” It skews the odds in favor of positive perception.

It’s good PR.

More restraining orders, besides, guarantees greater job security for those who administer them. It means there’s more “work” to get (handsomely) paid for doing.

More restraining orders also means greater substantiation of claims of “epidemic” this and that, which keeps dominant political interests happy and thriving (cha-ching!)…and justifies ramping up the process even further.

Facts and Fairness: Using Arizona’s Policies to Expose Restraining Order Iniquity

September 13, 2014June 24, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

I live in Arizona where I was issued a restraining order in 2006 petitioned by a woman I nightly encountered hanging around outside of my house. The restraining order said I was a danger to her husband and shouldn’t be permitted to approach or talk to him.

If you receive a restraining order in my home state, here’s the first thing that greets your eye:

On the basis of the form this warning captions—which looks like it was drafted by someone using a pizza crust as a straightedge—citizens are recorded in state and national police databases as stalkers and violent abusers.

Consider that the immediate impression this warning is meant to give is beware. It naturally excites fear—and if you’ve been falsely accused, a host of other emotions, besides, none of which conduces to calm and lucid thinking.

Something you wouldn’t guess from this “Warning to Defendant” is that if a defendant “disagrees” with an order issued in Arizona, s/he has the statutory right to apply for an appeals hearing at any time during the order’s effectiveness. For example, if the duration of the order is one calendar year, the defendant can take 11 months to assemble his or her appeal and save up, if necessary, to have an attorney represent that appeal.

Here’s the law:

At any time during the period during which the injunction is in effect, the defendant is entitled to one hearing on written request. No fee may be charged for requesting a hearing. A hearing that is requested by a defendant shall be held within ten days from the date requested unless the court finds compelling reasons to continue the hearing. The hearing shall be held at the earliest possible time. An ex parte injunction that is issued under this section shall state on its face that the defendant is entitled to a hearing on written request and shall include the name and address of the judicial office where the request may be filed. After the hearing, the court may modify, quash or continue the injunction.

The statute says the court’s order must inform the defendant that s/he’s entitled to a hearing, but it doesn’t require that the order inform the defendant that s/he has a year (or possibly years) in which to prep and apply for that hearing, that the hearing is free, or that the defendant may be represented by an attorney.

Restraining orders are rhetorical psych-outs. Their language is overtly menacing, and neither the law nor the issuing courthouse gives any consideration to apprising defendants of their rights.

The stress is on apprising defendants, who are presumed to suck (sight unseen), of what rights they’re no longer deemed worthy of.

Appreciate that the court’s basis for issuing the document capped with the “Warning” pictured above is nothing more than some allegations from the order’s plaintiff, allegations scrawled on a form and typically made orally to a judge in four or five minutes.

In the courthouse where the order issued against me was obtained, restraining order petitioners file into a room like a small bus station terminal, submit their applications, wait for an audience with a judge, chat with him or her for a few minutes, and leave.

That’s it.

Consequences of receiving an order of the court whose merits are determined on this basis include registration in state and national law enforcement databases, and may also include loss of entitlement to home, children, and possessions, and loss of employment.

In contravention of due process, orders are issued against defendants that may deny them liberties and property without the court’s hearing from them at all.

Ever.

In Arizona, unless a defendant requests a hearing before a judge, that’s an end on the process. No judge will even have learned what s/he looks like, and the truth of the plaintiff’s claims will never have been controverted—claims, to reiterate, that were made in a few minutes and could include anything from annoyance to physical or sexual violence.

Such claims often amount to nothing more certain than finger-pointing.

(Docket time afforded by the court to the testimony of defendants who go to the trouble of appealing rulings based on such claims, incidentally, is about 15 minutes. The cost of attorney representation at an appeals hearing may be $2,000 to $5,000.)

The only provision the law or the court makes for discouraging false testimony (some motives for which are here) is this one, which predictably appears at the very end of the application form:

The plaintiff signs below.

Applicants aren’t of course told what “perjury” is, and they’re certainly not told it’s a felony crime that carries a prison term (as it is and does in Arizona and many other states). Lying to the court is never sanctioned or prosecuted, anyway.

Recent posts on this blog were answers to dismissal by a doctor of laws of criticisms that the restraining order process is unfair. The process would have to be far more deliberative than it is, in fact, to be merely “unfair.”

The process is automated.

The Feminist Self-Contradiction: On the Flawed Conception of Restraining Orders and the Error of Preferring the Stick to the Carrot

July 12, 2014July 15, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Consider: At least a couple more restraining orders will have been issued in the time it takes you to read this post.

I pointed out recently that after 30 years and the issuance of millions or tens of millions of restraining orders, feminists and others continue to report that the incidence rate of domestic violence, which is the go-to rationale for restraining orders, is unchanged.

They report, in fact, that it’s “epidemic.”

Plainly restraining orders have put no dent in the problem. What’s more, it’s possible they’ve made it worse.

How this may be possible is simple. By authorizing gross and large-scale (epidemic) civil rights abuses for decades, the system has jaded the sentiment of a significant sector of the public. The punitive nature of both biased legal policies and the feminist rhetoric that has inspired them does nothing to change minds. It inspires resentment, outrage, and distrust, if not contempt.

Male victims of false restraining orders, in particular, who may well be a majority of recipients and number in the millions, can hardly be expected to sympathize with the feminist agenda. Worse yet, a goodly proportion of them may be far from sensitive to the interests of women generally, because feminism has associated itself with those interests inextricably.

Feminism doesn’t appeal to or cultivate sympathy; it largely strives to chastise and dominate, which can only foster misogyny.

Resentment toward feminist-influenced legal processes conduces to resentment toward feminists and consequently resentment toward women. Feminism works against its own mission statement and the interests of its nominated beneficiaries.

It’s certain that restraining orders have provided peace of mind to some petitioners. It’s certain, also, that they’ve compromised or devastated the lives of a significantly greater number of falsely accused defendants, who receive no compassion from feminist quarters.

On balance, the curative value of restraining orders is null if not negative. Per capita, that is, they do more harm than good. And the impact of each instance of abuse of power is chain-reactive, because every victim has relatives and friends who may be jarred by the reverberations.

Although it doesn’t occur to feminists, because they’re the darlings of the government and the media, their zeal to blame and punish is alienating instead of unifying.

The feminist m.o. is to win not win over…and nobody doesn’t hate a bully.

Thanks to kangaroo legal processes that are effectively products of their authorship, feminists’ potential supporters may number several fewer now than when you started reading this post.

Reporting Restraining Order Abuse to Elected Officials

June 27, 2014August 25, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“I am suffering from the effects of a fraudulent protection order in Colorado, which was filed by my female roommate and had me and my young daughter kicked out of our home.

“There appears to be no recourse for me, but I did contact 10 state representatives and senators, and I heard back from three of them. If more people report this abuse to their elected officials, maybe something will actually be done about this awful system.”

—Respondent to this blog

Writing to district and state representatives can be a lot like trying to communicate with judges. Expecting a human response isn’t unreasonable, but it’s often disappointed.

There’s nevertheless value in bringing systemic injustices to the attention of legislators (senators and congressmen and -women), because (1) they make, reform, and repeal laws, and (2) if they hear the same complaints over and over—and especially if they know other people of influence are hearing the same complaints and looking to them for action—there’s a chance some of them might step up.

The voices of women who’ve been abused by court process, particularly, need to be heard, because the procedures that are most often and easily abused are ones it’s presumed are protecting them.

Consult this site for the names and addresses/websites of elected officials with whom to register a complaint (state legislators should be first in order of importance):

“Find Your Representatives”

Victims Are Important, but They’re Not More Important than Anyone Else: Amending Priorities and Reconceiving Restraining Order Policy According to the Principle of Equality

June 20, 2014August 8, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“While some municipal court judges acknowledge that the domestic violence law can create injustices—one calls it ‘probably the most abused piece of legislation that comes to my mind’—there are counterpoints. Melanie Griffin, executive director of the Commission to Study Sex Discrimination in the Statutes, a legislative commission that drafted much of the 1991 law, says that for every individual who files a false report, ‘there are 100 women who don’t come in at all and stay there and get beaten.’”

—“N.J. Judges Told to Ignore Rights in Abuse TROs”

This quotation comes from a nearly 20-year-old journalistic exposé, yet you’ll find the same starkly meretricious apology for restraining order abuse routinely voiced today.

This quotation from the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) means that all people should be treated equally under the law, not that women should be privileged. Anyone who’s for women’s being afforded special treatment by the authorities and the courts opposes the message of the ERA, as do proponents of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

The argument, basically, is that it doesn’t matter if restraining order defendants’ rights are ignored, and it doesn’t matter if defendants are falsely accused, because there are many more victims of abuse who suffer in silence than there are false accusers.

The argument equates apples with orangutans. Its reasoning is partisan and purely emotion-based—and betrays ignorance of the fact that women, too, are falsely accused of domestic violence. Its thesis is that since there may be multitudes of unacknowledged victims of domestic violence, the state’s creating victims by abetting false prosecutions is of no statistical significance.

While everyone should feel for women who are “beaten” at home, no one should be forced by the state to endure “sympathy pains.” The falsely accused man or woman whose life is upturned or undone by hyped allegations or gross lies credited by careless judges is absolutely blameless for the suffering of strangers.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution, and equality and fair treatment under the law are among its mandates that brook no compromise. Denying the latter to anyone, ever—even if the motive is a sympathetic one—is categorically wrong.

The statement in the epigraph says: It’s okay if you, Mr. or Ms. Doe, are falsely accused and battered by the system, and it’s okay if it deprives you of your kids and home and livelihood and dignity and sanity, because some people you don’t know and never will know are reportedly “beaten” by some other people you don’t know and never will know.

It says there are women who suffer unjustly, so never mind if we make you suffer unjustly, too.

Restraining Orders and Feminist Self-Sabotage: On the Error of Preferring the Stick to the Carrot

June 18, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Consider: At least a couple more restraining orders will have been issued in the time it takes you to read this post.

They report, in fact, that it’s “epidemic.”

Plainly restraining orders have put no dent in the problem. What’s more, it’s possible they’ve made it worse.

Feminism doesn’t appeal to or cultivate sympathy; it largely strives to chastise and dominate, which can only foster misogyny.

Although it doesn’t occur to feminists, because they’re the darlings of the government and the media, their zeal to blame and punish is alienating instead of unifying.

The feminist m.o. is to win not win over…and nobody doesn’t hate a bully.

Thanks to kangaroo legal processes that are effectively products of feminist authorship, feminists’ potential supporters may number several fewer now than when you started reading this post.

Feminist Reports Conclude Restraining Orders Don’t Work: Time to End the Experiment

June 16, 2014July 9, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

The Internet is awash with images like these.

Restraining orders are defended on the basis that they protect female victims of domestic violence.

The most recent posts on this blog have stressed the constitutional violations that are necessarily entailed by the process. One of them reprints a 1995 New Jersey Law Journal exposé: “N.J. Judges Told to Ignore Rights in Abuse TROs” by Russ Bleemer. In various of the article’s quotations, the “epidemic” nature of domestic violence is emphasized. Almost 20 years later, you’ll discover by a casual Google search that domestic violence is still broadly termed “epidemic.”

If domestic violence was “epidemic” at the start of the restraining order boom, and it’s still “epidemic” two decades later after the issuance of millions or tens of millions of restraining orders, there are only a couple possible conclusions to be drawn: (1) restraining orders aren’t doing the job, or (2) restraining orders have exacerbated the problem.

Either of these conclusions leads to an inevitable third: the dividends of restraining orders are negligible if not negative. Juxtapose their negligible effectuality against the untold suffering they’ve wrought and continue to wreak, and legislators’ duty is clear: back to the drawing board.

The manifest unfairness of restraining order policy toward individual defendants is justified according to the belief that the overall benefit of restraining orders to society excuses large-scale civil rights’ violations and the abrogation of the most basic ethical tenets of law, like impartiality, diligent deliberation, and due process.

If the blanket benefit of restraining orders to the society as a whole is none, as feminists and others report—that is, if restraining orders haven’t actually downgraded the alert status of domestic violence from red after 30 years—then money is being flushed down the toilet along with the lives of restraining order defendants for no reasons but maintenance of appearances and appeasement of special interests.

No buts about it.

Ungoverned: Restraining Order Laws in Arkansas

May 29, 2014February 24, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

not-governed

I’ve combed the Internet in recent weeks for motion-to-dismiss forms applicable to restraining orders issued in the 50 states. For Arkansas, there’s nothing to be found. Zip. If that weren’t suggestive enough that the process is a lock, consider the above entry excerpted from a 2011 Arkansas Court Bulletin.

This means an accuser may be awarded exclusive entitlement to the family residence; sole custody of children; a monthly stipend from the former breadwinner, who may find himself out of a job subsequent to being issued a “domestic abuse” restraining order; and reimbursement of costs. Filing for a protection order, in other words, may gain a plaintiff everything and cost her (or sometimes him) nothing—whether the allegations it’s based on are true, hyped, or lies.

The case commentary (which you’ll observe publicly discloses the names of the parties to the action) concerns a man who was served with a notice to appear in court to answer allegations of “domestic abuse” six days thence.

Rough translation: “Dear sir, you’re expected in a courtroom next week to respond to allegations that you beat your wife.”

For people who know nothing about restraining order processes, appreciate that this man was given less than a week’s time to prepare a defense against obviously serious charges with obviously serious repercussions. In six days, he was supposed to come to grips with public allegations that may have horrified him, procure an attorney’s services, gather relevant evidence and testimony, etc.

Six days.

The bulletin reports that the man “sought a continuance [postponement], which was denied.” He didn’t attend the hearing. The commentary doesn’t indicate a reason. His request to have the order set aside, because the expectation of an immediate response didn’t conform to the Arkansas Rules of Civil Procedure, was also denied. Why? Because the Arkansas Domestic Abuse Act trumps the rules of civil procedure.

This case exemplifies why restraining order adjudications strike so many people as Kafkaesque: “I move—.” “No.” “Then—.” “No.” “But—.” “The rules don’t apply in your case, sir, and we don’t negotiate our decisions.”

Defendants’ being railroaded, of course, is nothing extraordinary. “Emergency” restraining orders may allow respondents only a weekend to prepare before having to appear in court to answer allegations—very possibly false allegations—that have the potential to permanently alter the course of their lives.

Extraordinary is the Arkansas courts’ openly and nonchalantly recognizing in a bulletin that their protective order process is “not governed by the rules.”

Its proceedings are “special.”

“Redeeming Feminism”: Making It about Equality and Not Victimhood

May 26, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Since the publication of this post, the feminist blog it cites and criticizes has been made private.

When criticizing injustices wrought by prejudicial, feminist-motivated laws and court procedures like the restraining order process, restraint isn’t easy to pull off.

It’s nevertheless worthy of striving for, because the gender divide that fosters the perpetuation of these prejudicial laws and procedures needs to be bridged—for the sake not just of their male victims but of their female victims, too.

I came across a blog yesterday titled, Redeeming Feminism. It arrested my attention, because its banner reads, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

The dramatic irony is lost on the blog’s author, but this is, of course, the argument against feminism, whose “second wave” has done at least as much to promote and enforce sexual bigotry as it has to eliminate it. (First-wave feminists, who sought to dissolve gender discrimination instead of cement it, were those who pushed for the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment from which the quotation above derives.)

Some feminists categorically can’t be reasoned with. They’re the equivalents of high-conflict courtroom litigants who reason with their feelings. But I don’t get the impression that the author of this blog is one such, and I think there are many self-styled feminists like her out there. She seems very much in earnest and without spiteful motive. Her intentions are well-meaning.

To judge from the wattage of her smile in the photograph of her on her blog, however, she’s never been stalked by someone only to have that person publicly and persuasively accuse her of stalking, or had it falsely suggested to authorities and the courts, for example, that she’s violent or a danger to children.

To quote a falsely accused woman I’ve corresponded with for the past six months, a professional nurse and mother of three who’s been through years of hell, that sort of thing “changes a person on a cellular level.” Had the blog author been subjected to what my correspondent has been—or what most of the respondents to this blog and to other blogs and petitions it links to have been—her smile would be considerably more muted (which would be a shame, because it’s a good smile).

This is the shortcoming of most vigorous feminist advocacy out there: It tends to see only what it was looking for in the first place. Its argumentation is based in the abstract. I wouldn’t wish the real on anyone, but before taking up arms, advocates of one position or another have a moral obligation to look up, down, and sideways.

The post on the referenced blog that I read is called, “Anti-Feminist Memes pt.3: ‘Domestic abuse, Men are the real victims’.” It rebuts the rhetorical strategies of counter-feminist “memes” on the Internet.

This is a meme.

This type of meme is extremely popular. In looking for memes to write about for this blog project, this theme was one of the most prevalent. Memes like these send a lot of messages simultaneously. First, they suggest that feminism is rooted in hypocrisy. They want us to assume that feminists not only support negative gender restrictions on men, but that they also encourage policy that will oppress men. A lot of these memes have phrases in them like “according to feminists,” “feminists believe,” and “feminist logic.” It’s not enough for these memes to suggest that men are oppressed more than women claim to be, the meme must also suggest that feminism causes and supports violence against men, with the aim of total male oppression.

Her criticisms, though spirited, lack balance. The “memes” she refers to don’t actually “suggest feminism is rooted in hypocrisy” (though this is certainly true of today’s feminism) or posit that “men are oppressed more than women,” nor do they appear to want anyone to “assume” anything. What they do is point out and denounce a double standard, which is an endeavor every true feminist should commend. The author of the blog doesn’t address the double standard; she takes a defensive tack and asserts that women are victims of violence and that such “memes” insensitively ignore this urgent fact.

This line of (emotional) reasoning basically says never mind if there is a double standard, because women are victims. It’s a logical bait-and-switch—and one that betrays unawareness that women are also injured by the same double standard.

These, too, are memes.

Laws that have arisen and been fortified in the last three decades in response to demands for the curtailment of violence against women are applied unequally and unfairly (which is another way of saying they disregard the most basic tenets of our Constitution). The prevalence of violence in the world is completely beside the point. John Doe isn’t his brother’s keeper and can’t justly be held to account for the actions of others. The fact is whenever anyone makes a complaint of domestic violence today, whether a woman or a man, his or her allegation may be presumed valid, especially in civil court, and the reason why this is so owes to feminist lobbying, which has engendered prejudice against defendants (who, once upon a time, were only men). When allegations of abuse are exaggerated or false, the consequences are often the same as they would have been had the allegations been true. Innocent men and women are rubbed out every day by procedures that are virtually automated. They’re criminalized, exiled from their families, stripped of property and resource, and sometimes barred from employment and even left living out of their cars or homeless.

The blog writer, a young woman, is piqued by domestic violence, as should we all be. Matters peripheral to it, like legal inequities, are lost in the shadows cast by its specter—and shouldn’t be. Even the specter itself is seldom scrutinized.

It must be considered, for example, that the authority for the statistic “1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime” cited by this writer (and which is commonly cited) is a pamphlet: “Domestic Violence Facts.”

Consulting its footnotes, you’ll find that this stat is derived from something called the National Violence Against Women Survey. In other words, the figure’s based on what women report on questionnaires.

Last week, I was sitting outside of a Starbucks in a posh strip mall and observed a couple standing 20 feet distant from me in the company of two others. The woman repeatedly belted the man in the shoulder and chest with a closed fist, and then proceeded to pinch him a series of good ones. He laughed and cringed from the attack. “Did you fart?” she demanded. He giggled. She punched him a few more times—good, resonant thwacks like you’d hear if you slapped a ham. She was still punching and pinching him when I turned back to my laptop.

What someone like the author of the blog I’ve cited would never conceive is that had this man called the cops and alleged that his wife assaulted him, there’s a very excellent chance that horseplay like this could cost her everything she owns, including her identity. “Did she punch him?” an officer might ask of witnesses. “Well…yeah, but….” And that might be that (criminal restraining order to ensue). It happens. Sometimes even the reports of onlookers precipitate arrests.

What everyone must be brought to appreciate is that a great deal of what’s called “domestic violence” (and, for that matter, “stalking”) depends on subjective interpretation, that is, it’s all about how someone reports feeling (or what someone reports perceiving).

Important to recognize is that how someone reports feeling about being punched or pinched may depend a lot on how that person is feeling toward the puncher or pincher at the time (or at a later time). In other words, actions that are harmless can be represented however a person wants to represent them.

When the state gets involved in private, interpersonal matters, consequences can be severe. What the “memes” the referenced blog writer confronts are concerned with is public perception that translates into law. Fervent condemnations of domestic violence don’t simply inform general opinion; they inform legislation and the application of laws by police officers and judges.

Feminist predilections, both to blame men and to perceive “violence” everywhere, encourage and, consciously or not, endorse exaggerated, impulsive, and/or false allegations. Feminism’s basic message to women today is, “You’re a victim.”

Is there any person walking the face of the planet over the age of five who hasn’t been slapped, punched, kicked, spanked, pinched, poked, or threatened? That’s a rhetorical question. Everyone has been the “victim of violence” if not the “victim of domestic violence” sometime in his or her life. The difference is not everyone is going to characterize him- or herself as a “victim.”

When someone like the author of the blog I’ve referenced uses the phrase domestic violence, she means wanton physical abuse and household terrorism, which is what the phrase used to mean. That’s not, however, how domestic violence is any longer defined by the law. The same phrase may be applied to angry phone calls—even a single angry phone call (which may easily be misrepresented or not even real). This blogger’s outrage is sympathetic; she’s just unconscious—as most people are—that the messages she’s outraged by aren’t veiled arguments in defense of battery; they’re rejections of a feminist message that has jaundiced popular perceptions and corrupted our laws and how they’re applied.

The zealousness of the public and of the authorities and courts to acknowledge people, particularly women, who claim to be “victims” as victims has produced miscarriages of justice that are far more epidemic than domestic violence is commonly said to be. Discernment goes out the window, and lives are unraveled based on finger-pointing. Thanks to feminism’s greasing the gears and to judicial procedures that can be initiated or even completed in minutes, people in the throes of angry impulses can have those impulses gratified instantly. All parties involved—plaintiffs, police officers, and judges—are simply reacting, as they’ve been conditioned to.

When everyone’s simply reacting, nobody’s actually thinking.

The road to feminism’s redemption will only be paved when feminists begin making observations like this.

“Clear and Convincing” Evidence: Applying a Standard of Decency to Restraining Order Prosecutions

January 27, 2014July 30, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

“This spring, the Maryland legislature killed a bill that would have brought Maryland’s restraining order policies into line with every other state in the union. Remarkably, in Maryland, a stalking victim seeking help is required to prove her case with ‘clear and convincing’ evidence, a higher standard than ‘preponderance of the evidence,’ which is the universal standard for civil dispute.

“There can be only one reason for this absurd requirement: that the Maryland legislators who voted for the bill…believe that women who testify that they’ve been abused are less credible than men who deny being abusers. That’s not a level playing field, and it’s an absolutely unacceptable attitude for a legislator to hold.”

—Ms. Magazine Blog (May 19, 2010)

It really isn’t an unacceptable attitude.

“Credibility” is not the equivalent of fact. For that matter, requiring substantiation of allegations that can undo a person’s life is hardly unreasonable, let alone “absurd.” What’s absurd is that the author of this blog post assumes that sexism is “the only reason” legislators might find proof to be reasonable standard to apply to restraining order allegations.

Concluding that “‘clear and convincing’ evidence” is an unfair judicial demand betrays a misunderstanding of what fair means.

What the writer’s conclusions also betray are the suppositions that false allegations are never made, that allegations of stalking or domestic violence should be matters of indifference to defendants (no biggie), that restraining orders are only sought by women, and that women are never the victims of false allegations.

Wrong, on all counts.

The Ms. Magazine Blog post features a picture of a woman with bruises on her throat and is titled, “Abused Women in Maryland Aren’t Lying.” There’s little reason to doubt that many women who allege abuses in Maryland aren’t lying. Saying so and posting lurid graphics, however, doesn’t prove that all of them are telling the truth or that all who allege abuses in the future would be. Laws tend to stick around for a while.

Requiring clear and convincing evidence that public accusations are true isn’t absurd; it’s the hallmark of civilization.

The idea that even one perpetrator of violence should escape justice is horrible, but the idea that anyone who’s alleged to have committed a violent offense or act of deviancy should be assumed guilty is far worse.

I don’t fault the writer for her earnestness. I think, rather, that she overestimates what the phrase preponderance of the evidence may signify. Too often in civil prosecutions, this standard may equate to persuasiveness; and false accusers, who may be in the throes of bitter malice or may live for an audience, can be very persuasive…for all the wrong motives. Restraining orders are issued ex parte, which means that in the absence of a standard of proof, anything plaintiffs say during brief interviews with judges is taken at face value and immune from controverting evidence from defendants, who are only inked names on bureaucratic forms. Defendants are excluded from the application process entirely.

No one wants victims’ plaints to go disregarded, but there must be a failsafe in place to protect against false allegations and guarantee a measure of equity. An ex parte ruling is already a prejudicial one.

Expecting less than a standard of clear and convincing evidence is absurd.

Presumed Guilty: On How Restraining Order Laws Enable and Promote Abuse

November 11, 2013February 23, 2018Moderator 6 Comments

I’ve had occasion in the last few months to scrutinize my own state’s (Arizona’s) restraining order statutes, which are a study in prejudice, civil rights compromises, and politically coerced naïvety. Their outdated perspective fails even to acknowledge the possibility of misuse let alone recognize the need for remedial actions to undo it.

Restraining orders are issued upon presumptive conclusions (conclusions made without judges ever even knowing who recipients are—to the judges, recipients are just names inked on boilerplate forms), and the laws that authorize these presumptive conclusions likewise presume that restraining order applicants’ motives and allegations are legitimate, that is, that they’re not lying or otherwise acting with malicious intent.

That, you might note, is a lot of presuming.

In criminal law, the state must presume that defendants are innocent; in civil law (restraining orders are civil instruments), defendants may be presumed guilty. What’s outrageous about this with respect to restraining orders is that public allegations made on them may be criminal or criminal in nature, and violations of restraining orders—real or falsely alleged—have criminal consequences. Due process and the presumption of innocence are circumvented entirely; and with these safeguards out of the way, a defendant may be jailed on no valid evidence or for doing something that’s only illegal because a judge issued a restraining order on false grounds that made it so. (A parent who’s under a court-ordered injunction may be jailed, for example, for sending his child a birthday present.)

One of my motives for consulting my state’s restraining order statutes is having absorbed a broad array of stories of restraining order abuse over the past two years. Common themes among these stories are judicial bias; lying and fraud by plaintiffs (applicants); restraining order plaintiffs’ calling, emailing, or texting the people they’ve petitioned restraining orders against (or showing up at their homes or places of work—or following them); and restraining orders’ being serially applied for by plaintiffs whose past orders have been repeatedly dismissed (that is, restraining orders’ being used to harass and torment with impunity).

Those who’ve shared their stories want to know how these abuses are possible and what, if anything, they can do to gain relief from them. The answer to the question of how lies within the laws themselves, which are flawed; the answer to the question of what to do about it may well lie outside of legal bounds entirely, which fact loudly declaims just how terribly flawed those laws are.

Arizona restraining orders are of two sorts, called respectively “injunctions against harassment” and “orders of protection.” They’re defined differently, but the same allegations may be used to obtain either. Most of the excerpted clauses below are drawn directly from Arizona’s protection order statute. Overlap with its sister statute is significant, however, and which order is entered simply depends on whether the plaintiff and defendant are relatives or cohabitants or not.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Grant one party the use and exclusive possession of the parties’ residence on a showing that there is reasonable cause to believe that physical harm may otherwise result.”

This means that if your wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend alleges you’re dangerous, you may be forcibly evicted from your home (even if you’re the owner of that home). The latitude for satisfying the “reasonable cause” provision is broad and purely discretionary. “Reasonable cause” may be found on nothing more real than the plaintiff’s being persuasive (or having filled out the application right).

“If the other party is accompanied by a law enforcement officer, the other party may return to the residence on one occasion to retrieve belongings.”

This means you can slink back to your house once, with a police officer hovering over your shoulder, to collect a change of socks. Even this opportunity to recover some basic essentials may be denied defendants in other jurisdictions.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Restrain the defendant from contacting the plaintiff or other specifically designated persons and from coming near the residence, place of employment or school of the plaintiff or other specifically designated locations or persons on a showing that there is reasonable cause to believe that physical harm may otherwise result.”

This means defendants can be denied access to their children (so-called “specifically designated persons”) based on allegations of danger that may be false.

“[If a court issues an order of protection, the court may do any of the following:] Grant the petitioner the exclusive care, custody or control of any animal that is owned, possessed, leased, kept or held by the petitioner, the respondent or a minor child residing in the residence or household of the petitioner or the respondent, and order the respondent to stay away from the animal and forbid the respondent from taking, transferring, encumbering, concealing, committing an act of cruelty or neglect in violation of section 13-2910 or otherwise disposing of the animal.”

This means defendants can be denied access to the family pet(s), besides.

Note that the linguistic presumption in all of these clauses is that recipients of restraining orders are wife-batterers, child-beaters, and torturers of puppies, and recall that restraining orders are issued without judges’ even knowing what defendants look like. This is because restraining orders were originally conceived as a deterrent to domestic violence (which, relative to the vast numbers of restraining orders issued each year, is only rarely alleged on them today at all). It’s no wonder then that judicial presumption of defendants’ guilt may be correspondently harsh. Nor is it any wonder that in any number of jurisdictions, an order of protection can be had by a plaintiff’s alleging nothing more substantive than “I’m afraid” (on which basis a judge is authorized to conclude that a defendant is a “credible threat”).

“A peace officer, with or without a warrant, may arrest a person if the peace officer has probable cause to believe that the person has violated section 13-2810 by disobeying or resisting an order that is issued in any jurisdiction in this state pursuant to this section, whether or not such violation occurred in the presence of the officer.”

This means you can be arrested and jailed based on nothing more certain than the plaintiff’s word that a violation of a court order was committed. More than one respondent to this blog has reported being arrested and jailed for a lengthy period on fraudulent allegations. Some, unsurprisingly, have lost their jobs as a consequence (on top of being denied home, money, and property).

“There is no statutory limit on the number of petitions for protective orders that a plaintiff may file.”

This observation, drawn from Arizona’s Domestic Violence Civil Benchbook, means there’s no restriction on the number of restraining orders a single plaintiff may petition, which means a single plaintiff may continuously reapply for restraining orders even upon previous applications’ having been denied.

Renewing already granted orders (which may have been false to begin with) requires no new evidence at all. Reapplying after prior applications have been denied just requires that the grounds for the latest application be different, which is of course no impediment if those grounds are made up. As search terms like this one reveal, the same sort of harassment can be accomplished by false allegations to the police: “boyfriends ex keeps calling police with false allegations.” Unscrupulous plaintiffs can perpetually harass targets of their wrath this way—and do.

No restrictions whatever are placed upon plaintiffs’ actions, which means that they’re free to bait, taunt, entrap, or stalk defendants on restraining orders they’ve successfully petitioned with impunity. And neither false allegations to the police nor false allegations to the courts (felony perjury) are ever prosecuted.

“A fee shall not be charged for filing a petition under this section or for service of process.”

This means the process is entirely free of charge.

Statistics of Fraud and Misuse Are beside the Point: Restraining Orders Hurt People

September 12, 2013June 20, 2023Moderator 9 Comments

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.

Circumventing Due Process Isn’t Just What Restraining Orders Do—It’s What They Were Designed to Do

September 3, 2013June 19, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

“Due process of law implies the right of the person affected thereby to be present before the tribunal which pronounces judgment upon the question of life, liberty, or property, in its most comprehensive sense; to be heard, by testimony or otherwise, and to have the right of controverting, by proof, every material fact which bears on the question of right in the matter involved. If any question of fact or liability be conclusively presumed against him, this is not due process of law.”

—Black’s Law Dictionary

The phrase due process (or due process of law) names those most fundamental legal entitlements that ensure an individual is provided the means and opportunity to defend him- or herself and his or her interests in court.

In the previous post, I observed that restraining orders skirt due process entirely—which I’m hardly the first person to remark.

As this post’s epigraph explains, whenever the court presumes that a person is liable for or guilty of some alleged transgression and enters a judgment against that person without first granting that person the opportunity to challenge the allegations against him or her, that person is denied due process.

Not kinda-sorta but flatly.

Since restraining orders (by legislative mandate) are issued ex parte, which means that the only parties judges hear from prior to entering rulings are restraining order applicants, every restraining order recipient is denied due process. Every one of them. Always. Restraining order defendants are just inked names on paper forms; judges have no idea whom they’re entering judgments against, and defendants have no idea judgments have been entered against them until a constable comes knocking.

Restated using legalese from this post’s epigraph, when a defendant’s guilt is “conclusively presumed,” as it is when a judge approves a restraining order, “this is not due process of law.” Restated simply, when rulings are made prior to defendants’ being given a chance to defend themselves, there’s no due process. Restated simplest, restraining orders = no due process = no adherence to the most basic principles of law = dirty pool.

This is an obvious and indisputable fact, and as I stated earlier, I’m hardly the first person to have noted it.

What’s more rarely observed is that denying defendants due process was the purpose of restraining orders’ being enacted. Restraining order legislation, by design, authorizes a plaintiff to communicate his or her allegations directly to a judge, without having to convince any legal authorities of the merits of those allegations, and requires that a judge enter a ruling on those allegations without a plaintiff’s having to face the person s/he’s accused. (Due process is a constitutional guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment—except when lawmakers say otherwise.)

The motive for this circumvention of due process is now a very dusty one.

Restraining orders were born three decades ago in response to a pressing demand from female advocates for a process that allowed at-risk women, particularly victims of domestic violence, to avoid the pain and humiliation of having to take their claims to the police (who may have discounted those claims or even criticized women for making them) and go straight to a judge, that is, to have the opportunity to quickly and quietly explain their hardships in a situation of security and minimal scrutiny.

In the social climate that predominated in the 1970s, this made sense. Wives were still expected, by and large, to stay home, tend to their kids and kitchens, and mind their husbands. If husbands sometimes got a little free with their hands, that wasn’t something you broadcast to the world.

Restraining orders, which were legal finesses from the outset, were meant to arrest domestic violence and provide abused women with a discreet and minimally agonizing way to communicate abuse to the court and gain immediate relief from it. It certainly wasn’t on the minds of lawmakers at the time (or anyone else) that restraining orders would one day be applied to routine annoyances or that applicants might fabricate allegations or manipulate a free and convenient process for malicious or selfish ends.

Legislators bowed to social pressures for very sympathetic reasons. The problem is they’ve gone right on bowing for 30 years without consideration to how far restraining orders have drifted from their original intent or to whether their denial of due process to defendants is still justifiable.

Today, relative to the millions of restraining orders that are issued every year, it’s only seldom that allegations of violence are made on restraining orders at all.

Which doesn’t at all mean that the presumption of violence (stalking, sex offenses, etc.) isn’t applied to restraining order recipients universally.

Warrant for the continuation of a process whose nuclear cloud has gusted so far from its target demands a retrofit. This isn’t 1979, and there no longer exists any conscionable excuse for denying defendants due process of law. This is 2013, and violating defendants’ civil rights and burdening them thereby with criminal imputations for the rest of their lives is cruel and unusual punishment.

It’s vicious.

The restraining order process either needs to be dusted off and revisited or relegated to the dustbin of history.

Circumventing Due Process: On How Restraining Orders Personalize Law

August 30, 2013June 21, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

A frequent commenter to this blog, one with philosophical leanings, pointed out recently that restraining orders personalize law.

His point is that where prior to the advent of restraining orders complaints of abuse would have been vetted and either rejected or acted upon by the police and district attorney based on the evident merits of those complaints’ allegations, today the middlemen whose scrutiny formerly provided a safeguard against false or frivolous allegations’ unjustly contaminating a defendant’s life have been removed from the equation.

A plaintiff now effectively determines what should merit the court’s intervention him- or herself merely by filling out a boilerplate form and leveling allegations in a brief interview with a judge, which allegations (especially if made by a woman) judges have been trained to all but accept unquestioningly.

A plaintiff, whose motives can hardly be expected to be free of bias and may be wholly malicious, preempts the roles of the police and district attorney and is furthermore entitled not only to communicate his or her allegations directly to a judge but to expect that the judge will accept those allegations at face value—in the complete absence, moreover, of any contradictory testimony or evidence from the defendant, who is also bypassed.

Due process, a constitutional guarantee, is skirted entirely: a person walks in off the street and says it; therefore it is so.

Loan officers at banks were as easily persuaded six years ago that anyone who strolled through the door should be given a loan. They observed the same turnstile policy commonly followed by the courts in the issuance of restraining orders. Applicants were happy, because they weren’t disappointed, and officers looked good, because they met their quotas.

The result of this policy was that one of the systems that hold together the fabric of our society was bankrupted.

“perjury and sociopaths”: On the Challenges of Contesting Restraining Orders Sought by the Mentally Aberrant, Deranged, or Ill

April 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 41 Comments

A recent respondent to this blog detailed his restraining order ordeal at the hands of a woman who he persuasively alleges is a sociopath. He says this label is generally scoffed at by people he explains the matter to and wonders how he could convince a judge of its accuracy.

Since this blog was published nearly two years ago, hundreds have been led to it by search terms that include words and phrases like “sociopath,” “mental illness,” “narcissist,” and “personality disorder” or “borderline personality disorder” (“bpd”).

This should hardly be a source of surprise.

Restraining order applicants aren’t screened based on their psychiatric histories. Sociopaths and narcissists, who are seldom clinically diagnosed in the first place, are moreover cunning liars and manipulators. Obtaining restraining orders—which are issued solely on the basis of brief interviews between petitioners and judges—is not only a simple matter for them but rewards their pathological drives for dominance and revenge.

Characterized generously, the restraining order process is fast-food justice. The ability and opportunity of most defendants to qualify allegations of sociopathy or insanity against their accusers—assuming these defendants even recognize these conditions—is effectively none at all. And unless a restraining order applicant is completely off the wall, his or her allegations won’t even cause a judge to arch an eyebrow. Applicants are in and out of restraining order interviews in a matter of minutes. Sociopaths are the smoothest liars you’ll ever meet, and the insane may be more convincing yet if they wholeheartedly believe their allegations in spite of those allegations’ possibly having no relationship to reality at all.

The imperceptibility of mental disorders is what makes them so difficult to expose (on this subject, see also these related posts).

I could go on about how easily the restraining order process is abused by sociopaths or the otherwise mentally aberrant. And I could describe to you the devastating effects their false allegations have on the lives of those they abuse. Instead I’ll close with some of the relevant search terms that have brought readers here since this blog’s inception. Identical search terms have been eliminated (“beating a narcissistic sociopath,” for example, rolls in regularly).

“beating a narcissistic sociopath”
“emotional crimes” “sociopathy”
#beating a narcissistic sociopath
a crazy person filed a restraining order on me
a mentally ill sister files false charges in virginia
a narcissist filing pfa
a narcissist that plays the victim role
abuse by a nsrcisistic sociopath restraining order
abusice narcissist ruined my life erased
antisocial personality disorder and self-victimizing statements
antisocial personality mom filed abuse charges against
are narcissists con artists?” for order of protection
attention seeker false abuse
attorneys lawyer in san jose for emotionally abused men by bpd wife
attribute mental illness false allegations
bdp, false charges,revenge
beating a narcissistic sociopath in court false accusations
beating a narcissistic sociopath restraining order
bi polar ex gets restraining order
bipolar and getting a protection order against me
borderline ex got ppo
borderline ex ruining my reputation
borderline false restraining orders
borderline mother making false accusations
borderline personality and false restraining order
borderline personality and restraining order
borderline personality boyfriend call the cops with false alligations
borderline personality disorder and denied restraining orders
borderline personality disorder and false accusations and restraining orders
borderline personality disorder and restrainig orders
borderline personality disorder and restraining order police
borderline personality disorder false accusations
borderline personality disorder false allegations restraining order
borderline personality disorder false harrassment claims
borderline personality disorder false pfa
borderline personality disorder getting a restraining order against me
borderline personality disorder restraining order
borderline personality false domestic violence
borderline personality perjury custody
borderline personality restraining order
borderline personality wife how to stop her ruining my reputation?
borderline restraining order
borderline teen making false accusations
borderline trying to ruin reputation
borderline woman and restraining order
borderline woman out to ruin my reputation
borderline women false accusations of violence
borderlines and protection orders
borderlines and restrainging orders
bpd “false accusations” police
bpd and false accusations
bpd and restraining order
bpd and restraining orders
bpd and slander
bpd destroying other peoples false allegations, police, court, arrested, crazy
bpd ex boyfriend wanting revenge
bpd ex filed restraining order
bpd ex got ppo
bpd ex ruined my reputation
bpd false accusations and jealousy
bpd false accusations legal process
bpd false harassment claims
bpd false protective orders
bpd false stalking
bpd filing protection of abuse order to spouse
bpd gf abused me
bpd how to deal with false allegations california
bpd protective order children
bpd restraining order dropped
bpd restraining orders
bpd restraining orders fraudulent
bpd spouse ruined my life
bpd threatening to call cops
bpd why do they make false accusations
bpd wife filing for restraining order based on false accusations
bpd wife put restraining order on husband
bpd wife ruined my life
bpd woman and restraining order
california domestic violence false allegations borderline disorder
can you secretly videotape a narcissist for proof of perjury
civil harassment and narcissistic personality disorder in california
crazy ex girlfriend filing fake assault charges on me
crazy girlfriend filing fake domestic violence charges
crazy girlfriend pfa
crazy girlfriend who makes false police reports
crazy neighbor got a restraining order on me
darvo + bpd
darvo and the bpd
dealing with sociopaths in court
defeating a sociopath
defense of false allegations and maryland and personality disorder
defense says plaintiff is sociopath
destroyed by a narcissis sociopath
destroyed by a narcissist sociopath
do abusive narcassists like reatraining orders
does the bpd woman return after making false allegations
ex wife is a bpd and keeps filing bogus restraining orders how to stop this
exposing a sociopath narcissist in court
false accusations police borderline personality
false charges of child sexual abuse and narcissistic personality
false police report made in missouri due to mental illness
false report by mentallt ill girlfriend az
false restraining orders and personality disorders
female narcissist revenge
female sociopaths family court
fighting a sociopath ex husband in court
fighting back against false claims made by borderline personality disordered women
fighting tro placed on you by a person with bpd
fraud narcissist
god’s plan for me after bpd wife restraining order
harrassment sociopath courts
help me, i got punished at work psychopath due incapable work and fraud
how can i beat my bpd wife in court
how can my narcassist husband that said loved me file and go through with false exparte now all i had is gone
how to beat a narcissistic in court
how to beat a narcissistic sociopath
how to beat a narcissitic sociopath
how to beat my sociopath ex gf in court pfa
how to beat narcissistic mother in court
how to deal with sociopath in court
how to deal with mentally ill making false reports against you to the police
how to expose a sociopath
how to expose a sociopath in court
how to fight a psychopath in court protection order
how to get rid of a sociopath ex wife + filing false restraining orders
how to outsmart a sociolpath in divorce fraud
how to protect yourself against false allegations by bpd ex wife
how to stop a sociopath from filing false restraining orders + family court
how to win against a narcissistic sociopath in court
how to win against a sociopath in court
husband refusal to submit to bpd false accusations
is wise to take back a bipolar daughter that put on me a restraint order but the judge exonerate me?
lies and false accusations sociopath ex husband custody
malicious sociopathic sister
mental and personality disorders
mental help dealing with sociopath restraining order
mental history restraining order
mental illness gets restaining order
mental illness protective order
mental illness restraining order
mental illness took out false ppo against me
mental illness, extended family, and restraining order
mental+illness+&+no+contact+orders
mentally disabled wife files false restraining order
mentally ill and restraining order
mentally ill daughter filed restraining order
mentally ill exwife harassing
mentally ill false protective order
mentally ill filing false ppo michigan
mentally ill keeps makng false allegations
mentally ill spouse filed false orders of protection
mentally ill stalker filing false police reports
michigan ppo put on me by crazy sister
my bipolar gf filed a restraining order
my bpd ex girlfriend had me served with a tro
my mentally unstable daughter mad a false police report what should she do
my narcissistic ex put a restraining order on me
my wife has mental illness lied on restraing order
narcassist and restraining order
narcisist court orders
narcisist puts restraining order on me , will he come back?
narcissism and criminal fraud
narcissism and restrainig orders
narcissism and restraining order
narcissism restraining order
narcississ threatens restraining order
narcississtic man filing false police reports
narcissist above the law
narcissist abuse of legal system
narcissist an drestraining order
narcissist and a civil protection order
narcissist and false police reports
narcissist and falsifying police reports
narcissist and final restraining orders
narcissist and lying fabricating lies
narcissist and personal protective order
narcissist and protective order
narcissist and restraining orders
narcissist convincing
narcissist darvo
narcissist ex boyfriend falsely accused me of domestic violence
narcissist ex finally got what she want filed restraning order against me
narcissist ex girlfriend filed sexual harassment
narcissist ex girlfriend puts a restraining violent order on me
narcissist exwife put restraining order on me
narcissist false allegations
narcissist false allegations of stalking
narcissist filed a false pfa on me
narcissist filed bogus pfa against me
narcissist filed bogus pfa against me and it was denied
narcissist filed pfa agains me
narcissist files for order of protection for revenge
narcissist files restraining order
narcissist got a restraining order against me
narcissist got restraining order against me
narcissist has filed restraning order
narcissist has restraining order
narcissist husband filed fake restrainig order on me
narcissist husband filed for divorce and served me a restraining order
narcissistic in the civil courts how to beat
narcissist lied and got restraining order
narcissist lied to police and had me arrested
narcissist lies
narcissist lying on court affidavit
narcissist playing the victim
narcissist plays the victim
narcissist put restraining order on me
narcissist restraining order
narcissist restraining order child custody
narcissist restraining order on me
narcissist restraining order still talking to me
narcissist seeking sole custody filed tro
narcissist spouse discards
narcissist threatened me with a restraining order
narcissist wife files assault charge
narcissist’s false accusers
narcissistic abuse order of protection
narcissistic abusive sociopath
narcissistic borderline restraining order
narcissist domestic abuse
narcissistic ex filed restraining order against me for finding out her lies
narcissistic mother restraining order
narcissistic personality disorder and restraining order
narcissistic personality disorder in the family court system
narcissistic personality disorder injunction for harassment
narcissistic personality disorder restraining order
narcissistic revenge
narcissistic revenge tactics
narcissistic sociopath
narcissistic sociopath false accusations
narcissistic sociopath in court
narcissistic sociopath restraining order
narcissistic sociopath women restraining orders
narcissistic sociopaths
narcissistic spouse accused you of domestic abuse
narcissistic threatens restraining order
narcissistic woman false domestic violence
narcissistic women and false accusations of “stalking”
narcissistic women making false statement
narcissists accuse me of harsment
narcissists and misuse of restraining orders
narcissists and restraining orders
narcissists are evil
narcissists breaking protective orders
narcissists make their children lie
narcissists restraining order
narcissists restraining orders
narcissists ruin lives
narcissists who try to get protective orders
narcissit grudge
narcissitic bastard filed a false restraining order on me
narcissitic ex husband slandering new husband
narcisstic men and restraining orders
narcisstic personality disorder and restraining order
narcisstists restraining order abuse
narrcassist use restraini.comg orders
narrcissist and false restraining orders
narrsim and not letting go even with a restraining otder
neighbor harassment mental illness maryland
new petition for change of custody based on false accuasations by exhusband with bpd
npd and protection orders
npd and restraining order
npd disordered people will they threaten to have you arrested on false charges
npd restraining order
npd sister “restraining order”
obssive vindictive narcissist and a restraining order
pathological liar and restrainig orders
perjury & narcissist
perjury and sociopaths
personality disorder order protection illinois
personality disorders and restraining orders
physcopath husband filed false dv
protective order mental illness
psychopath free restraining order
psychopath lied to get restraining order
psychopath manipulating a woman to make a false allegations against me
psychopath narcissist abuse
psychopath put restraining order against me took my house
psychopath restraining order pennsylvania
psychopath targets roomate for false arrest
psychopathic husband had me arrested for dv
psychopaths and restraining orders
psychopaths entrap their victims
psychopaths: what attorneys and judges should know.
psyphopath and perjury
recourse mental ill ex-spouse slandering
restraining order and mental illness
restraining order and narcissist
restraining order appeal personality disorder
restraining order mental illness
restraing orders and sociopaths
restraining orders borderline personality disorder
restraining orders from sociopaths
restraining orders in ma for mentally ill
restraining orders sociopath and narcissist
restrasingn ordre and psycopath
revenge of a narcissist after divorce
self exaltation and lying by bpd
signs of mental illness false accusations against people
sociapathic narcissistic ex boyfriend filed restraining order, how do i fight it
sociopath & restrainig order
sociopath accusing me of harassment
sociopath and court orders
sociopath and false abuse
sociopath and perjury
sociopath and restraining order
sociopath and restraining orders
sociopath as vexatious litigant
sociopath behavior perjury
sociopath civil perjury
sociopath daughter put a restraining order on me
sociopath fake police report
sociopath false domestic abuse charges
sociopath game restraing order
sociopath made vile false accusations about me
sociopath makes false allegation and forgets
sociopath mom files restraining order on her child
sociopath narcissist bogus protective order
sociopath order protection
sociopath perjury
sociopath restraining order
sociopath restraining order abuse
sociopath tricks restraining orders
sociopath with a restraining order
sociopath narcissist bogus protective order
sociopath women restraining orders
sociopathic boyfriend threatens with restraining order
sociopathic narcissist violence domestic and he had me falsely arrested for self defense
sociopaths and orders of protections
sociopaths and protective orders
sociopaths and restraining orders
sociopaths restraining orders
socipath protective orders
son’s psychopath ex girlfriend keeps harassing him
stop narcissist filing motions
the narcissist and false accusations of stalking
the narcissistic wife and false accusations of abuse
the sociopath is making me the victim mentally sick
the teenage sociopath and false accusations of abuse
type of personality disorder restraining order
uk divorce “narcissistic spouse” “false accusations”
victims rights and narcissist
what do i do about mother of my grandchild having me investigated .she is one with persnality disorder lying to dept of childrens services
what to do against falst accusations from a borderline personality disorder
what type of person does a sociopathic narcissist target?
when a crazy person tries to put a restraining order on you
when a narcissist files a restraining order on you
when a narcissist files false charges against someone
when a narcissist puts a restraining order against you
when a wife leaves a husband and then claims false tro bpd
who can help with narcissist exhusband knowing everyrhing i do calling filing bogus xharges on me
why do bpd women ruin lives
why do narcissists play the victim
why do sociopaths file restraining orders
why has the narcissist put a restrianing order on me
win court against narcissist
winning an epo hearing against mentally ill wife
woman narcissistic sociopath no contact orders abuse
women with mental illness that file pfa’s
youtube when a narcissist call police with false statment

coerced restraining orders, coerced protection orders, coerced orders of protection, coerced tpo, coerced protective order, coerced ppo, coerced pfa

Coercing Coercion: State Abuses of the Restraining Order Process

March 13, 2013June 18, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

I was emailed yesterday by a humbly polite man whose family was under threat of eviction from their state-subsidized living quarters if his wife refused to swear out a restraining order against him. He admits to a criminal past but says he’s engaged in no recent conduct that would warrant this invasive action. Nevertheless his inaccessibility to legal representation and his family’s being in dire financial straits make his wife’s “choice” inevitable: either he lives in a refrigerator box on the streets or he shares one with his wife and children.

Browsing the Internet brings up similar accounts of coercion by government agents (of a process that is itself inherently coercive: “Do what we say or live in a cage”):

And these stories are echoed by others that have led visitors to this blog over the past year.

So unregulated and debauched is the restraining order process that even agents of the state abuse it without worry of censure or reprisal. Its manipulation has become standard operating procedure and is both systemic and systematic. There are even secret passwords to cue judges as to how they should rule on restraining order applications: “Just say you’re ‘in fear of immediate danger’”—wink, wink.

These are the cynical conspiracies of those who know they have the power and can abuse it arbitrarily. Public perception of restraining orders is that they’re indispensably vital to checking the misconduct of “bad guys.” The propagandists who maintain this duck blind—feminist advocates, for example—are often true believers who militate for even broader court discretion and laxer standards of due process, ignoring the truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And lawmakers and administrators yield to popular sentiment.

As for the kids who are either left fatherless or are tossed to the curb or fostered out—they don’t vote, anyway.

“a restraining order ruined my life”: A Partial Catalog of Search Engine Queries Leading to This Blog on a Single Day

March 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

The 148 search engine terms that appear below—at least one to two dozen of which concern false allegations—are ones that brought readers to this blog between the hours of 12 a.m. and 7:21 p.m. yesterday (and don’t include an additional 49 “unknown search terms”).

Were it the case that only 12 of the thousands of restraining orders issued on a given day were based on false allegations, the number of fraudulent restraining orders generated by our courts in a single year would be 4,380 (the recipients of which may have to live, for example, with false allegations of stalking or domestic violence on their public records, and may besides have been forcibly evicted from their homes, possibly at gunpoint). This absurdly conservative casualty toll of restraining order abuse ignores lives peripherally affected by it, including those of spouses, boy- and girlfriends, and children and other family members.

It’s in fact estimated by extrapolation from government studies that a majority of the two to three million restraining orders issued each year are either “unnecessary” (that is, frivolous) or grounded on trumped-up allegations. Statistics concerning restraining orders (for example, the number of them that are thrown out on appeal, often at a cost of thousands of dollars to their defendants) either aren’t compiled or aren’t made readily available to the public by our judicial system—nor is there any way of determining the incident rates of depression, stress-related injury and disease, alcoholism and drug abuse, job and income loss, suicide or premature death, etc. linked to restraining order abuse.

The number of plaintiffs prosecuted for committing felony perjury to obtain restraining orders is zero.

due process in restraining order
can a police officer work in a town if someone has a restraining order against them
dated a manipulator whose threatening me with a restraining order
how much does it cost to heat a restraining order
state puts restraining order
fighting exparte maryland
does my husband have the right to slander my name to my doctor
wisconsin consequences of false accuse get t restraining order harrassing non-violent
can u beat pfa in ohio if you have prior mental issues
can you get a protective order cause of a threatening phone call
can i include my girlfriend in a restraining order
court order protected party lets restrained party contact
my friend called the police and gave a false statement. this person owes me money and now i cant call or talk to him. how do i get my money?
ex abusive restraining order broken uk
can he make a restraining order against me
court order to stop me being approached
if someone files a police report on me for saying i would slap them but i didn’t and they threw a book at the door i was exiting out of who would get charged
how long do you have to wait to file a restraining order from the time you filed a police report?
is posting pictures of someone on facebook who has a pfa illegal?
can you put a restraining order on your mom
a restraining order ruined my life
wife filed restraining order against me
odds of getting a restraining order
can a restraining order be filed against an officer
what happens if i violate my restraing order in the us
if i dont want to press charges will they drop the restraining order
i was violent ny girlfriend wont take me back
restraining order aginst crazy ex boyfriend houston texas law
peace order in new york for a church’s
how does a lawyer handle a defendant for restraining order in pennsylvania
what happens if someone avoids being served a restraining order
order of protection for stalking-does it go on your record
can my adult son take legal action if i try to call him?
what happens if you run from the cops while they’re trying to serve you a restraining order
is there a protective order against me without being served
what type of attorney do i hire to prosecute malicious prosecution
can i email to offer a settlmeent to someone who has a tro on me
pressing charges againstfraudulent restraining order
how to get a restraining order against someone who has one against me
can you charge someone with fraud without concrete evidence ny
expunging ex parte orders missouri
how to stop someone from filing false lawsuit
restraining order in washington can i my attorney represent me?
how to protect yourself against false accusations protective order hearing
how long before a ppo expires if u never get served with it
can i send a email to someone who issued me a tro offering a settlement
defemding yourself against a civill harrassemnt order ca
can i get in trouble for responding to my ex if there is a no contact order
counter restraining order
my wife is the plaintiff and broke her own protection order in kansas is it still in effect?
if u never physically harmed someone can they put a restraining order on you
can you appeal a protective order entered against you
do you have to notify your job you have a ppo against someone
is it put defendant in better position if plaintiff dies?
what to do if served with an order of protection arizona
what happens when a restraining order is dropped
restraining orders cause women to get hurt
can a restraining order be issued if charges are dropped
narcissistic friends and family
court ordered protective order for minor expires
should i notify my job about peace order
is it legal for a lawyer to call me and say i have a court date but not serve me by paper?
can i file a pfa against an exlovers new girlfriend
is it easy to ask for more distance in a restraining order
can you report protection order based on suspicion only
how to get a court order lifted off my child, i dunno if social had it on all my girlfriend
do they put date i went on restraining orders
husband under protection order rules
can i file protective order on someone who has filed one on me
my wife wanted temporary support and my lswyer was able to fight it and let the status quo remain
can an order of protection be placed without pressing charges in nys
my husbands girlfriend filed a restraining order against me so they can try to take my baby away what can i do
tro was dropped but i want to prove she lied
if i call someone a name can they get a restraining order against me
how to sue my daughters mother for filing a false claim
what to do if someone files a false restraining order against you
can i speak to the judge for a restraining order before my court date?
can court provide lawyer for defendant with restraining order
what to do if ex girlfriend files ppo an
does continued unwanted third party contact violate a protection order
is requesting the pettiontioner on face valate restrainign order
how do you get a restraining order in arkansas against my daughters boyfriend
can employers find out about restraining order
can i sue someone for a false order of protection
can i lay charges against someone who says im having aids?
what if i’m threatened with libel and slander
how can i pick up my belongings from ex wife that hit me with restraining order
how to defeat a pfa
restraining order served me
fighting false restraining order in illinois
can i report someone breaking restraining order even if its not against me
if someone files a says they police report against you saying you hit someone
can a person get a false restraining order
is telling someone’s boyfriend that he can do better than his present girlfriend a defamation of character
what to write on removing a restraining order
slander in restraining order violation
how to vacate a protection order in massachusetts
bogus criminal protection orders
maryland protection order petitioner does not show
washington state legal action against texting harassment
how to cancel injunction for self but keep kids on?
canmy ex husband get a restraining order to stop me sending letters to my kids
are az injunction against harassment ever thrown out on appeal
can my husband file a restraining order without cause in california
can you file a restraining order against someone who has posted a video of you
can you sue someone for put a restraining order on you
how to cancel a protective order in ok
how to stop a restraining order against me
how to take off a restraining order in missouri
my fiance dad keeps attacking my fiance by sending him to court
what if a person files a false tro in california
“civil restraining order” alberta
the police called me on phone restraining order
vacating restraining order when alleged victin is incarcerated
how much trouble for braking protection order
what would happen if you don’t follow protective order
what possibility could happen if the judge findss out allegations of harrassing are false accusation
if someone keeps taking communictain threats warrants out on me and dropping them is that slander
drop restraining order before
person using dishonest restraining order to intimidate
is my husband post new pictures online and then put the disclaimer that i can’t copy them will it be illegal for me to copy them
can they file a restraining order for making phone call
which is the hr theory where one is defending oneself just because he is telling other do the same and no action it taken against him
what to say on a restraining order to get it dropped
can a email someone with a settlement offer if i have a tro
what happens to the plaintiff if she is caught with the defendant in a restraining order
beating a narcissistic sociopath
what happens if i have a restraining order and at same party
what happens if a family court order of protection is broken through phone calls
nm law on appealing an order of protection
npd father won’t accept no contact keeps calling to my house
can i call my spouse’s girlfriend without getting into trouble
how much will an attorney cost me to represent me in a restraining order hearing
courts won’t honor my request to drop restraining order
sue wife for defromation of charchter after restraing order
can a police officer work in a town if someone has a restraining order
expungement arrest for restraining order alabama
im charging someone with abuse
will police pursue criminal charges based on a restraining order
if i have a hearing in court for a temporary restraining order can i go in and see the judge early
knotty
what if i don’t go to court to enforce restraining order
when the mother of a child file a restraining order and is lying
defamation of character and wrongful dismissal because of spousal dispute
penalty for lying on a restraining order
when temporary restraining order expires does come back
defending a restaining order from your own home
ex-girlfriend served restraining order falsely

Knotty, Knotty: False Allegations and Restraining Orders

February 21, 2013June 19, 2023Moderator 20 Comments

Whoever came up with restraining orders must have been a marvel at Twister.

Though they’re billed as civil instruments, restraining orders threaten their recipients with criminal consequences and may be based on allegations of a criminal nature, for example, stalking, sexual harassment, the threat of violence, or assault.

The standard of substantiation applied to criminal allegations is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Since restraining orders are “civil” instruments, however, their issuance doesn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt of anything at all. Approval of restraining orders is based instead on a “preponderance of evidence.” Because restraining orders are issued ex parte, the only evidence the court vets is that provided by the applicant. This evidence may be scant or none, and the applicant may be a sociopath. The “vetting process” his or her evidence is subjected to by a judge, moreover, may very literally comprise all of five minutes.

Based on allegations leveled in this hiccup of time by a person with an obvious interest in seeing you suffer, you are now officially recognized as a stalker, batterer, and/or violent crank and will be served at your home with a restraining order (and possibly evicted from that home) by an agent of the nanny state: “Sign here, please” (“and don’t let the door hit you on your way out”).

The application of a standard of proof to restraining order allegations is circumvented entirely: what a plaintiff claims you are becomes the truth of you. The loophole is neatly conceived (and it’s exploited thousands of times a day). Your record may be corrupted by criminal allegations like those enumerated above based on crocodile tears and arrant lies spilled on a boilerplate bureaucratic form. And these allegations may tear your life apart.

Abuse of restraining orders for malicious ends is a court-catered cakewalk.

How easily it’s exploited for foul purposes, in fact, is the restraining order process’s claim to distinction from other judicial procedures. Even by veteran officers of the court, false allegations made in restraining order petitions are routinely accepted at face value. The reasons for this are manifold:

Judges are trained to regard women’s plaints as legitimate and may never question this prejudice, because it’s shared by the society at large. And to appear to be fair, a judge may apply the same prejudice to allegations brought by men against women.
No judge wants to be the one who refused a restraining order to someone who later comes to harm, because (a) he will have failed a constituent in need and be perceived as having had a hand in her (or his) injury; and (b) because he will be publicly vilified, likely fired or forced to resign, and possibly sued.
Innocent defendants never succeed in making a stink that would put a judge’s career in jeopardy: erring on the side of a plaintiff poses no threat to a judge’s job security, while erring on the side of a defendant may cost him not only his job but considerably more.
It’s in the financial interests of local jurisdictions and their judges to appear to be “cracking down” on society’s bad eggs.

Lying to obtain a restraining order, therefore, is a cinch. Any lowlife can do it.

Disinterest (a.k.a. objectivity, fairness, impartiality, yadda-yadda-yadda) is the essential canon of judicial ethics. Since it’s one that clearly doesn’t obtain in the restraining order process, this judicial procedure is also distinguished from others by its inherent corruptness.

This corruptness is obscured from public awareness by yet another knot. Innocent defendants, in endeavoring to extricate themselves from false allegations—for example, as this author has by clamoring in a blog—cannot help but appear to be the fixated “deviants” that those false allegations represent them to be. The more they resist the allegations, the more they seem to corroborate them.

Appearances are not only the predominant grounds for restraining orders; appearances are what motivated their sketchy conception in the first place (“We’ve got to show we care”), and appearances are what preserve the corrupt process from which they issue from being recognized for the disgrace that it is.

“You Mean It Isn’t All about Me?”: On Women and Restraining Orders

December 5, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

A woman writes: “I got a TRO, and he got a lawyer.” (TRO abbreviates “temporary restraining order.”)

What’s the first thing that strikes you about this search engine query? The first thing that strikes me is that this woman seems surprised. You can almost hear the exclamation point that was left off the Google search.

Her incredulity at having her restraining order challenged seems to suggest that its defendant shouldn’t regard it as a big deal, which would suggest that she doesn’t regard it as one.

Which would suggest that she’s either careless of the consequences of her action or very self-preoccupied—or both.

Over the past three decades, feminist advocates have succeeded in making restraining orders more and more punitive and more and more public. The current push is to have restraining order recipients recorded in public registries like sex offenders. Some such registries already exist.

It shouldn’t be any wonder that men are loath to be criminalized by the “civil” restraining order process.

The query that led this woman to this blog underscores a schizophrenic rift that obtains in the way women regard restraining orders. On the one hand, they expect women’s plaints to be considered grave and urgent and restraining order allegations to be taken very seriously; on the other hand, they expect defendants to take their licks and forge ahead in spite of those publicly recorded allegations’ permanently compromising their futures. Maybe women want to have their cake and eat it, too—or maybe they don’t really think about the consequences to defendants at all.

Civil equality—the insistence upon which was the original motive for the legislative enactment of restraining orders—means uniform regard for the rights, value, and well-being of all citizens, irrespective of gender. With the social ascendancy of women in recent decades has come instead an unexamined assumption that what’s important to them should be what’s important to everyone.

Restraining orders aren’t a game, a fact that’s contradicted by the ease with which they’re sought, the carelessness with which they’re issued, and the apparent expectation from plaintiffs that they should be upheld based on their word alone. All restraining order plaintiffs should have to face cross-examination in court. Social conscience should demand it.

Either restraining orders should be taken seriously, or they should be taken off the books.

“Take That!”: On Restraining Orders’ Catering to Hurtful Impulses

November 30, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Someone asks: “Can I be charged for talking to someone I put a protective order against?”

Someone else asks: “What to do when [the] petitioner contacts you under a restraining order to tell you she loves you?”

Search engine queries like these regularly lead readers to this blog. Along similar lines, one reader reports his girlfriend moved back in with him after filing a restraining order to forbid him from coming near her. Another reports his girlfriend’s subsequently moving in up the street from him after doing the same. Yet another reports his girlfriend’s stalking him after successfully petitioning for a restraining order against him. Such questions and reports prompt an unavoidable conclusion: restraining orders are obtained impulsively.

Which leads to a further obvious conclusion, namely, that they’re urged too readily by authorities and gotten too easily.

This is the scenario as I’ve seen it play out in the restraining order cases I’ve personally been privy to: party goes to the police to register a complaint, police solicitously “suggest” a restraining order, party—feeling righteously supported by the system and possibly obligated to it—immediately goes to the courthouse and obtains one (which in my state is free and takes less than an hour to acquire).

I’m sure that restraining orders are sometimes taken out by people with very real concerns for their safety and that some of these probably accomplish what they’re meant to (which is to provide their plaintiffs with a sense of security).

I’m unconvinced, however, that this recommendation validates the restraining order process’s annual $4-billion-dollar-plus price tag (and that’s just its cost to the United States). Or the untold costs to defendants of frivolous and fraudulent restraining orders.

After a year of monitoring queries to this blog by restraining order plaintiffs and defendants, this is what I am convinced of: that restraining orders are commonly petitioned in hot blood by plaintiffs who are ushered (or goaded) through the procedure and who neither weigh the consequences of their actions on defendants or ever have the gravity or expense of this action impressed upon them. I’m further convinced that danger is only rarely a legitimate factor in restraining order cases and that motives for petitioning restraining orders are commonly ulterior to those stated—typically boiling down to “Take that!”

Worse, I’m convinced that officers of the court—lawyers and judges—know this very well and are by and large content to play along and profit on the discord and misery they abet.

Oh, and to the man who writes, “Does she still love me if she got a restraining order on me?” the answer, disturbingly, may be yes.

Mind the Gender Gap: On Coming Together against Restraining Orders

November 25, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

This blog was “liked” this week by a blogger whose collegiate disciplines are criminology and sociology. In her own blogs, she tracks news of interest to students of these fields that relates especially to social justice and gender-based violence and oppression (phrases that are often mistaken as exclusively concerning the same thing).

Contrasting her blogs’ contents with those of sites that monitor and editorialize on issues of concern to this blog highlights a divide that must be spanned if progress is to be made toward achieving genuine social justice (the word social being inclusive of both sexes). Informed and objectively critical minds like hers—sensitive both to the needs for civil equality and recognition and redress of violence toward women—are out there, and cultivating their advocacy is vital to reforming the defective restraining order process.

I’m a day laborer and would-be children’s humorist who doesn’t even have Internet service at home. The time I’m able and willing to devote to keeping tabs on movements in the blogosphere is scant. But I have perforce become familiar with many of the sites that focus on restraining order injustice, and the preponderance of respondents to most if not all of them are men whose views on this injustice and the issues that orbit it typically derive from one ideological bias or another: post-70’s misandry, the political favoritism shown to women in the West, the courts’ attack on the family, etc.

I don’t challenge the merits of their beefs, which far from lacking legitimacy are very defensible; but these forums leave little room for unification of awareness and purpose among activists and socially conscientious members of the community at large.

The advocacy rift is often crudely genital: boys siding with boys and girls either seeing the boys as villainous, uncompromising, or exclusionary. Men, reared as and genetically engineered to be rule-oriented beings, equate unfair with wrong (plain and simple). Women, pragmatic and historically the holders of the short end of the stick, aren’t immune to the difference between fair and unfair but know the impetus behind the advent of restraining orders to be an urgent and well-grounded one: men are violent.

Men aren’t going to quit being violent if the restraining order process is dissolved, and the process isn’t going to trend toward fairness if it isn’t. Herein lies the rub.

Both sides of this divide are naturally reactionary, and the mediated space—that occupied by those sensitive to both truth-born positions—is narrow and sparsely populated.

It’s a manifest and uncontestable fact that the restraining order process is biased, unconstitutional, and injurious to both men and women who find themselves on its receiving end. It caters to and rewards fraud, and liars come in both sexes. The process’s flaws will only become clear to the mainstream when proponents of one team or the other stop being opponents.

The split in perspective is as much Cartesian as sexual: body vs. mind. Violence can in fact be of either sort, physical or psycho-emotional. Even rape isn’t strictly a physical act. Many violations, equally traumatic and enduringly oppressive, are perpetrated by men and women who never touch their victims. A false allegation of rape, for example, is a rape. The notion that physical violence is necessarily worse is facile and unexamined. Physical violence is loud and dramatic; psychological violence is invisible and insidiously corrosive. Both can be catastrophic. Calumnious lies are just as likely to drive victims to despair or even conceivably suicide, and the pain of these violations is magnified manyfold in the case of false allegations made in restraining order cases, because victims (men, especially) can’t expect social sympathy, as victims of violence may, but quite the opposite: condemnation. (This was the horror that kept a lid on abuses by Catholic priests for so long. Adults molested as boys were constrained from coming forward by fear of further shame, humiliation, and social indictment. Damages finally awarded to these victims weren’t for their being manhandled so much as their being scarred to the extent that they failed to thrive.)

Mob mentality is what sustains the crooked restraining order process; it won’t be what leads to its revision. A problem is that those who speak against it have never been a direct party to it (except in the case of activist attorneys), and those who have been victimized aren’t talking at all, because they’ve been intimidated into silence. Advocates tend to subscribe to one dogma or the other: good/bad, pro/con. Good or bad, useful or not—these are natural but misleading inquiries. The restraining order process is flawed and destructively pernicious, being both subject to and permissive of wanton abuse. To bring this fact and its poignancy across to a political consensus, the partisan gap must be closed. Finger-pointing is fruitless and even erroneous, because the real culprit is a faceless bureaucratic machine that has no oversight.

And it’s going to take a plurality of arms to pull the lever that stills its gears.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag restraining order legislation