“Dropping” a Restraining Order

March 27, 2014July 15, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Note: There are civil restraining orders (the usual kind) and criminal restraining orders. These issue from different courts, and the distinction is big.

Learning the ins and outs of restraining order litigation has for this writer been an ongoing educational process bordering on a descent into hell that he’s only submitted to with a great deal of teeth-gnashing. In my state (Arizona), it’s possible for a plaintiff who’s petitioned for a restraining order in civil court to return to the same court and file a motion to have it vacated (canceled). Presumably (and I say “presumably,” because laws and protocols vary from state to state), similar provisions are universal.

An exception that I’ve encountered in search terms leading to this blog and respondents’ comments is the criminal restraining order. Its purpose and prohibitions are the same as a civil restraining order’s, but it’s issued by a judge in connection with a criminal prosecution and need not be petitioned at all (though its issuance may be requested by either the plaintiff or the county/district attorney).

It isn’t so easily removed even if the “victim” (for example, of a domestic dispute reported to the police) moves the court to “drop” it.

The common conception is that someone makes a charge and can drop the charge if s/he wants later on. This isn’t strictly the case, though. Oftentimes, once this process is initiated, it leaves the “victim’s” hands. The system does what it “thinks” is best.

Those interested in dropping a criminal restraining order should consult the link at the bottom of this recently constructed page—which catalogs types of restraining orders and what they’re called in different jurisdictions—for more information provided by an attorney in Denver.

In closing this post, I’m prompted by a recent comment from a woman whose husband inadvertently ended up in prison to emphasize that moving the court to drop a restraining order—that is, submitting a motion to the court—isn’t a guarantee that it will be dropped. That determination is up to a judge.

Restraining orders should be observed by defendants according to the letter of the law until it’s been confirmed in no uncertain terms by the court that they’ve been vacated (dropped). Plaintiffs may think, for instance, that if they say it’s okay for someone who’s been issued a restraining order to come home that it is okay. Their authority isn’t recognized by the law, however, and a restrained party’s violation of an injunction, even with the “victim’s” consent, is grounds for arrest and incarceration.

It may seem that authorities and judges bend the rules as they see fit, and this impression isn’t necessarily wrong. But never doubt for a moment that their intolerance of others’ bending the rules is unforgiving.

Face Mask or Baseball Bat?: Abuse of Domestic Violence Laws and Restraining Orders

March 26, 2014May 5, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

“As a male victim of domestic violence, my voice was never heard by any responding police officer. In fact, when they arrived my batterer made false allegations against me [that] led to my arrest. Three years later, the Eloy Police Department settled out of court, admitting wrongdoing. Still, I lost my career, my name, and three years of income because of the sexist actions taken by Arizona law enforcement.”

—E-petition respondent

“As strange as it sounds, the very laws designed to help victims sometimes hurt them. After I spent over a year as a lead attorney in a specialized felony domestic violence court, I realized the potential for abuse of the domestic violence system. Often, perpetrators of domestic violence would twist the system by accusing their victims of domestic violence. On the theory that ‘the best defense is a good offense,’ batterers accused the victims to neutralize any claims they feared their victims would make against them. In addition, I have seen parties to family law cases make allegations of domestic violence to try to gain an advantage in a divorce proceeding as relates to custody or property settlements.”

—Family attorney Samantha D. Malloy

Everything that’s wrong with restraining orders becomes emphatically pronounced when you observe that a process originally conceived to provide relief to victims of domestic violence may easily be abused to magnify and compound their torments.

That abusers should eagerly embrace the opportunity to heap further pain on their victims (while simultaneously exculpating themselves) should hardly be shocking to anyone. What’s shocking is how readily this opportunity for offenders to reverse roles with their victims presents itself (which role-reversal, readers will note, the quoted attorney remarks occurs “often” not rarely, as is commonly posited by those hostile to exposure of the rampancy of false allegations and abuses of restraining orders).

To get a protective order, one must only complete and sign a petition “under oath” or “penalty of perjury.” The petition is given “ex parte” (in the absence of the accused and without their notice) to a judge, who will enter the order if certain necessary allegations are made. There is no trial or requirement of further evidence before the initial order is entered.

The subsequent hearing of testimony and evidence, typically prejudiced by the preconception that the accused is guilty, is furthermore answerable to no strict standard of proof (hence Ms. Malloy’s advertisement of her services). It’s too often the case that procurement of an “initial order” represents a fait accompli, because calculated histrionics, finger-pointing, and concocted allegations from a persuasive plaintiff (particularly a female plaintiff) are all but certain to clinch a favorable judgment.

Noteworthy finally is Ms. Malloy’s acknowledgment that false allegations of violence, which are devastating in the emotional oppression, humiliation, and social and professional havoc they wreak on the falsely accused, are used strategically to gain leverage in divorce proceedings.

None of this information is new. Its potency, however, is defused by feminist dogmatists and their sympathizers—who refuse to concede that false allegations are commonplace—with the claim that men’s rights or fathers’ rights groups sensationalize the frequency of false allegations or purvey false information about their frequency. If feminist hardliners were sincerely invested in social justice, they would ask practitioners in the field of law, particularly family law, what their impressions and perceptions are (based on real-life experience).

Ms. Malloy, who may well be an exceptional attorney but isn’t exceptional among attorneys in her acknowledgment that restraining orders are abused, advertises her services both to victims of domestic violence and victims of false allegations of domestic violence. If the dogmatists were right about false allegations’ being rare, or if the restraining order process were anything approaching fair and just, she wouldn’t have to switch-hit, would she?

Vigilance against Miscarriages of Justice: What’s Deplorably Lacking in the Justice System’s Issuance of Restraining Orders

March 25, 2014July 25, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

“If there is one theme that emerges from all of the recommendations in this report, it is vigilance—everyone involved in the criminal justice system must be constantly on guard against the factors that can contribute to miscarriages of justice….”

—Canadian Department of Justice (2005)

It’s more than a little disturbing to this writer that a “Report on the Prevention of Miscarriages of Justice” has to recommend that the Canadian justice system exercise vigilance. You wouldn’t think an external audit would have to emphasize the importance of guardedness against errors that destroy lives.

Yet this recommendation is one that the U.S. justice system and many others are no less in urgent need of heeding.

Disturbing, also, are that the phrase miscarriages of justice is typically only applied to wrongful criminal convictions and that false allegations are discounted as contributing significantly to the number of miscarriages of justice, when in fact they’re responsible for the majority of them. Fraudulent claims are certainly unexceptional in civil proceedings, and the successes of fraudulent claims in civil court are just as much miscarriages of justice as failures of the system that result in false criminal convictions are.

Regarding civil restraining order adjudications, which number in the millions each year and which are singularly distinguished for their lack of vigilance against fraudulent claims, it may be more useful to point out that their results often equate with convictions in the tolls they exact (if not dramatically exceed them) than to argue that rulings in such cases should be no less the products of painstaking deliberation than rulings in criminal cases should be. If the net consequences are on a par with each other, so too should be the degree of vigilant scrutiny brought to bear on each.

Consider these excerpts from recent accounts on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence.” Italics are added.

“I have been falsely accused of domestic violence. I lost my home and my kids, and haven’t been convicted of a crime.”

“My whole career in law enforcement and EMS was ruined in a matter of minutes—all for a false accusation. My present work privileges are suspended from the medical field, and I am bound to the state pending trial for something I did not do….”

“This signature is on behalf of my brother…. He lost everything: the house that was his long before the marriage, all his belongings, but most of all his girls. It is so not fair. He is a victim…of a corrupt judicial system.”

Miscarriages of justice can occur even when the falsely accused aren’t convicted of anything, and as stories like these stress (and such stories are legion), the consequences can be life-sundering.

A noteworthy component of the report quoted in the epigraph is its recommendations to agents of the justice system on how to improve their job performance. It’s assumed by those who’ve been victimized by abuse of legal process that judges could do their jobs right if they wanted, but choose not to. The truth, though, is that they, like everyone else, need to have their failings pointed out to them.

Arguments made to trial judges often include definitions of words. Since this post is an argument, I’ll conclude it with some:

ethics, rules of right and wrong;

deprivation, the act of taking away by force;

vigilance, watchfulness, alertness, or caution;

miscarriage, a failure.

“You Don’t Send Me Flowers Anymore”: About the Revolving-Door Policy of the Restraining Order Process, Its Administration by Conveyor Belt, and Its Being Arguably Ridiculous

March 20, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

What’s legal when it comes to a restraining order against me? Can I send her flowers, legally?”

—Recent search term leading to this blog

The answer to the latter question is no. Sending flowers is a violation of a restraining order and grounds for arrest. “I Did Time for Calling FTD” would, however, be a great title for a feature story.

What these questions highlight are two very important facts, both of which are absurd and expose how mindlessly automated the restraining order process has become.

The first of these important facts is that the nanny state issues restraining orders carelessly, tactlessly, and callously. Their recipients are completely bewildered, and no one actually explains to them what a restraining order signifies, what its specific prohibitions are, or anything else. If a cop is involved, s/he may impress upon a restraining order recipient that the court’s order should be “taken very seriously.” (“What should be taken very seriously?” “The court’s order!”) That’s it. Not one person involved even inquires, for example, whether the restraining order recipient is sighted (as opposed to stone blind), mentally competent, or knows how to read. Restraining orders are casually dispensed (millions of them, each year) and then, unless they’re violated intentionally or accidentally (and motive doesn’t matter; the cops swoop in, regardless), they’re dispensed with: “NEXT!” “NEXT!” “NEXT!” It’s a revolving-door process that’s administered by conveyor belt but enforced with rigorous menace. That’s the first important fact.

The second important fact is that someone can be jailed (incarcerated, locked up, put away) for sending flowers.

PERJURY: BS-ing the Court, the Frequency of False Allegations, and the Fraudulent Abuse of the Civil Restraining Order

March 15, 2014July 12, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

In the last post, I discussed how lying is generally gotten away with beneath the radar. What people who’ve blessedly had no personal experience with fraudulent abuse of legal process fail to grasp is (1) there’s no incentive to expose untruths except (perhaps) when they’re used to frame people for crimes for which they stand to be convicted, (2) lies are much more commonly used to re-frame the truth into one favorable to the image or malicious intentions of fraudsters than they are to send people to prison, (3) lies don’t have to succeed in false criminal convictions to be damning or ruinous, and (4) lies may be of sorts that are impossible to discredit yet may permanently corrupt the public records and lives of the falsely accused.

Writers, for instance, who confront false allegations of domestic violence don’t actually invite their imaginations to conceive what such false allegations might be. Perhaps they vaguely suppose they’re of this nature: “He beats me with a belt buckle” or “She locks me in the pantry.” False allegations like these may certainly be made, but lies may be much more subtle or vaporous: “I live in a constant state of fear” or “She said she was going to kill me while I sleep.” Is the truth or falsity of these latter claims possible to ascertain? No. Police reports and restraining orders may be based on allegations like these, however, and anyone who imagines maliciously motivated people are incapable of making false statements to this effect have lived enviably sheltered lives.

False claims of stalking are as easily manufactured: “He creeps around my neighborhood late at night” or “She cut me off in traffic, almost running me off the road.” Allegations like these may not only be the substance of false police reports (which may—and do—gnaw at the sanity of their victims) but may be grounds for false restraining orders (which are far more nightmarish). In fact, the latter allegation was the basis of an emergency restraining order reported to this blog, which was petitioned against a college girl, in or just out of her teens, by her female counselor. The girl and her mom had a weekend to prepare her defense, and she wasn’t fully exonerated of her accuser’s litany of “terror-inspiring misconduct” (which included the girl’s greeting her accuser a few times in chance public encounters in a town of 2,000 residents and seeing her at church).

False allegations of sexual harassment? “He‘s repeatedly told me he wants me to [X] him” or “She keeps propositioning me”—try disproving allegations like these, which may be much more explicit and include claims of physical molestation. The consequences, if it’s necessary to enumerate them, could include termination of employment, marital dissolution, peer or social isolation, and the emotional and thus physical decay that accompany each or all. False claims like these, which take mere seconds to articulate, may never be recovered from.

For making such false allegations to the authorities and courts, there are no consequences, except to their victims. There are statutory penalties on the books for making false claims (committing perjury), but they’re rarely if ever enforced and couldn’t be enforced consistently within governmental budgetary constraints, so commonplace is lying. Are such false claims going to end up in some statistical database? Of course not. Ask an honest district attorney, though, why lying isn’t prosecuted, and s/he’ll tell you it’s because lying is an everyday occurrence.

This is the invisible irony that escapes everyone who tackles consideration of rates of false allegations: the fact that lying isn’t prosecuted is the indicator of its rampancy (prosecution of frauds on the police and courts would overwhelm the system). And because lying isn’t prosecuted, it’s in the interest of maintaining the dignity of the legal system and the semblance of just and orderly process that judges not acknowledge even flagrant lies as such. To acknowledge them in all their plenitude, yet not punish them, would be to call into question the legitimacy of the system itself. Restraining order frauds, moreover, may be rewarded with favorable verdicts in spite of lies, making the concealment of those lies by judges that much more urgent.

Society has been conditioned, in the decades since the advent of the restraining order, to be hyper-vigilant and -reactive toward allegations of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual harassment—behaviors associated with male abuse of women, which the restraining order was conceived to curb, if not remedy. These offenses are ones to which the population has been vigorously, even coercively, sensitized. The justice system is consequently poised to descend upon those accused of such behaviors (including women), as is the public poised to believe allegations of such behaviors to be true, especially when validated by the courts.

False accusers are certainly aware of these prejudices and may easily exploit them—and should hardly be expected not to. Agents of the system may, in fact, goad them on, even while salting the wounds of those who report that they’re victims of false allegations by telling them they have no legal recourse (which, practically speaking, they don’t). Judges, furthermore, may scourge such victims in the courtroom based on allegations that their accusers leveled in one-sided, five- or 10-minute auditions.

To recap: Liars aren’t prosecuted, so lies aren’t acknowledged as lies, but the civil procedure that’s most eagerly and impulsively abused by liars, the restraining order process, is supremely lax, instantly gratifying, and universally promoted. This procedure, what’s more, indelibly fouls a falsely accused defendant’s public record; may deny him or her entitlement to home, children, and property; and may cost him or her, besides, employment and employability in his or her chosen field of endeavor.

If this weren’t infernal enough, the outrage and misery expressed by victims who’ve found themselves in the eye of this perfect storm of unreason, some of whom are left impoverished of everything that gave their lives meaning, are credibly denounced or even mocked as crackpot.

The Truth about the Frequency of False Allegations ISN’T to Be Found in Statistics: On How Fraudulent Abuse of Civil Restraining Orders Escapes Recognition

March 12, 2014June 19, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

I’ve earnestly and objectively examined posited rates of false allegations in recent months, because statistics and analytics are what we soonest regard as estimates of the truth. It’s typical of writers hostile to the notion that false allegations are rampant, as well as of legal analysts and social scientists, to cite such rates, particularly official approximations of the incidence of false claims of rape and domestic violence.

What even very balanced and cogent analyses of these rates fail to observe, however, is that not all false allegations are of crimes and not all false allegations of crimes are criminally alleged, that is, false allegations of crimes may very conveniently be made through the civil court on restraining/protection order applications (as may be false allegations of every other kind). The number of criminal claims rejected or discredited by the police, then, is not an accurate measure or reflection of the prevalence, nature, or magnitude of false allegations.

It doesn’t, in fact, scratch the surface.

Allegations made pursuant to the procurement of a civil restraining order are never dismissed by the police (and plaintiffs may bypass the police entirely). Unless a complainant seeks to have someone criminally charged, the police have nothing to do with it. Their role is simply that of usher. They steer the complainant toward the courthouse. And if a restraining/protection order is obtained (or possibly just alleged to have been obtained) by a complainant, police inclination is to credit his or her allegations on reflex, because they’ve been conditioned to accept restraining order applicants’ claims at face value, that is, as legitimate.

Because the truth or falsity of allegations is irrelevant in civil proceedings, there are no comprehensive statistics relating to false allegations made on restraining orders. The awarding of restraining orders is grounded on the forcefulness of plaintiffs’ allegations and judicial discretion. It might be possible to determine how many restraining order applications nationwide were rejected in a given period; it’s impossible, however, to determine how many were rejected because judges determined their allegations to be false (rather than just insufficient), or how many were approved in spite of false allegations.

There is no accurate assessment of the volume or degree of lying in civil court. Significantly, too, false allegations made in civil court may easily evolve into criminal allegations that stick, despite those criminal allegations’ original premises’ having been trumped-up.

Journalists who address the subject of false allegations, typically focusing on rape, are prone to dismiss the charge that false allegations are commonplace based on how few plaintiffs are prosecuted for bringing fraudulent allegations. The false assumption of these investigators is that fraudulent allegations are necessarily prosecuted when detected. The fact is that even false allegations of rape may only rarely be prosecuted (see, for example, this case, in which allegations were determined to be unfounded and cost their plaintiff $55,000 but weren’t deemed grounds for the plaintiff’s being prosecuted for perjury). False allegations of sorts other than rape may never be acknowledged as false by judges, let alone deemed grounds for prosecution by district attorneys’ offices (which couldn’t care less). So the equation prosecutions for false allegations are rare = false allegations are rare is flatly wrong.

Isolated, regional studies have been performed by governmental agencies, including one in West Virginia that famously concluded that four out of five (domestic violence) restraining orders were either “unnecessary” or fraudulently based. Since an estimated two to three million restraining orders are issued each year in the United States alone, however, even national scrutiny of every restraining order issued in a given week for false allegations would be impracticable.

Restraining order rulings—disregarding how they’re perceived by the accused and how others perceive the accused because of them—aren’t determinations of guilt or innocence, as criminal rulings are. Restraining order rulings are at best kinda-sorta judgments based on plaintiffs’ persuasiveness.

Even that’s overly dignifying a process that’s initiated on the basis of a brief, one-sided interview of five or 10 minutes that results in the issuance of an order of the court that its defendant may be granted only a half-hour hearing to challenge (and only half of that 30 minutes is afforded to the defendant’s presentation). The idea that restraining order rulings are the products of scrupulous deliberation is beyond absurd.

To repeat, there is no accurate assessment of the volume or degree of lying in civil court. And it’s worthy of repeated observation, moreover, that when false allegations succeed in restraining order adjudications, defendant susceptibility to false criminal allegations increases exorbitantly, so prejudicially is the procurement of a restraining order regarded. How handily restraining orders are obtained and how carelessly their merits are ruled upon are conveniently disregarded after the fact. The next judge down the line is authorized to assume that the original allegations validated by the previous judge were in effect “true.”

The system is rigged both to guillotine the falsely accused and to ensure that false allegations are never discerned or acknowledged as such. The conception is marvelously diabolical, and its effectiveness is witnessed by the fact that the restraining order process has hummed along without a hitch for decades in spite of its being outrageously slack and tendentious (even while levying monstrous sanctions).

Where honest parties with an interest in social justice should seek an estimate of the volume, degree, and consequence of lying is in the testimonies of defendants and the lawyers who (sometimes) represent them—who, in the latter case, if they’re honest (and many are), will readily own that exploitive and malicious use of restraining orders is unexceptional, particularly in family court.

That statistics themselves lie shouldn’t be a novel proposition to anyone. The truly desolating fact to everyone who’s been lied about is that purveyors of statistics of false allegations may not have the least idea that their denial of the rampancy of lying invalidates the trials and torments of multitudes of victims.

Restraining Order Fraud Needs to Be Recognized for What It Is: CRIME

March 10, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

“Emotional distress as the result of crime is a recurring theme for all victims of crime. The most common problem[s], affecting three quarters of victims, [include] fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping. These problems often result in the development of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

—Wikipedia, “Victimology”

Restraining orders are governmentally advertised and popularly perceived as deterrents to crime, particularly stalking/harassment and domestic violence. In other words, they’re supposed to do good.

It’s no wonder, then, that the idea that restraining orders may be used to commit crime and do grievous harm is regarded with indifference if not hostility.

The very real if inconvenient truth remains that victims of false allegations made to authorities and the courts present with the same symptoms highlighted in the epigraph: “fear, anxiety, nervousness, self-blame, anger, shame, and difficulty sleeping”—among a host of others. And that’s just the ones who aren’t robbed of everything that made their lives meaningful, including home, property, and family. In the latter case, post-traumatic stress disorder may be the least of their torments. They may be left homeless, penniless, childless, and emotionally scarred.

It’s time for a much overdue reality check: victims are victims, and it doesn’t matter one iota whether a victim is injured by a recognized crime or one that society prefers to pretend doesn’t occur because it’s complicit in its commission. Treating victims like fiends, in fact, compounds victimization manifold, as any zealous bandier of the phrase victim-blaming should eagerly corroborate.

The quoted Wikipedia entry observes that we (among other countries) have a National Crime Victimization Survey (“a tool to measure the existence of actual, rather than reported, crimes”) to determine our country’s victimization rate. “This survey enables the government to estimate the likelihood of victimization by rape, sexual assault, robbery, assault, theft, household burglary, and motor vehicle theft for the population as a whole as well as for segments of the population such as women….”

False allegations, predictably, aren’t recognized as criminal, which of course both false reporting to the police (a statutory misdemeanor) and perjury (a statutory felony) most certainly are. Moreover, and significantly, all of the crimes enumerated in the quotation immediately above may be abetted or excused by the state’s endorsement of restraining order fraud—and at the same time. Victims of restraining order abuse may not only be victims of assault (or even conceivably rape) by their false accusers; by virtue of the state’s validating false accusers’ allegations, the accused may literally be stripped (robbed) of their belongings (i.e., property, vehicles, and money), and ousted from their homes, besides, and forced to forfeit entitlement to them (along with access to their own children): grand theft everything.

E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. We’re talking not only about trivializing suffering or “blaming the victim” but of punishing the victim to a cruel and unusual extreme—and congratulating ourselves for doing it. (Feminist) rights advocates make much ado about society’s discounting or trivializing the suffering of victims, ignoring that the state may, for example, yank victims of domestic violence from their homes and kick them sobbing to the curb if their abusers finger them on restraining orders first.

Blaming victims of false allegations made on restraining orders IS “blaming victims of terror for not wearing bulletproof armour,” and why false allegations on restraining orders are so effective (and devastating) is because of the basic message of posters like this: When victimhood is asserted, it’s not to be questioned.

The perceptual blind that preserves these crimes from being exposed and redressed is the “unspoken, politically correct rule that the role of the victim…is NOT to be explored” acknowledged by Dr. Ofer Zur in “Rethinking ‘Don’t Blame the Victim’: The Psychology of Victimhood.” The presiding prejudice that procurers of restraining orders are victims not only enables false accusers to commit theft and abuse on a grand scale (in cases effacing the lives of their male and female victims entirely); it enables them to do so with authorization and impunity, and on top of it all to be rewarded with sympathy. This is victim-blaming with a megaphone.

Victims—victims—may be incarcerated (locked in cages) and serially persecuted (in cases, for years) after having been tossed in the street and having had everything they owned and cared about taken from them. A survey of the accounts on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” will make the horror plain to any reader with a soul (or even just an ounce of honesty).

Denial of this horror by agents of the abuse industry underscores that rights advocacy has become corrupted by dogma, politics, and cash. If it was ever truly about justice, any claim that its mainstream manifestations still are is beyond disingenuous. It’s criminal.

Victim-Playing and Restraining Order Fraud

March 8, 2014July 6, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Victim playing (also known as playing the victim or self-victimization) is the fabrication of victimhood for a variety of reasons such as to justify abuse of others, to manipulate others, a coping strategy, or attention seeking.”

—Wikipedia, “Victim playing”

Once again I’m prompted to note that Wikipedia is all over motives for restraining order abuse but squeamishly avoids confronting the subject directly.

Restraining orders cater to and reward victim-playing like nothing else, because hyped or fabricated allegations made to judges aren’t subject to scrutiny or contradiction by anyone who knows the plaintiff (accuser) or defendant (accused). Procurement of a restraining order authorizes a victim-player (whether a bully, manipulator, or attention-seeker) to concoct any story s/he wants for third parties, including colleagues/coworkers, friends, and family. To the fraudster, it’s a golden ticket.

Allegations made on restraining orders are answerable to no standard of proof, are ruled on in the absence of any controverting evidence or testimony from the accused, and are made at no risk to a victim-player and at no cost beyond a few minutes of his or her time. Because lying to obtain a restraining order is child’s play for an unscrupulous accuser, and because this fact is known only to those who are lied about, a victim-player’s audience is easily convinced of his or her falsehoods, which may be extravagant. Gulled employers, for instance, may be induced to institute special security protocols to “protect” a victim-player from his or her victim. S/he doesn’t even have to be a particularly good actor. A restraining order sells itself.

In “Rethinking ‘Don’t Blame the Victim’: The Psychology of Victimhood,” psychologist Ofer Zur observes, “The victim stance is a powerful one. The victim is always morally right, neither responsible nor accountable, and forever entitled to sympathy.” The appeal, whether to a bully or attention-seeker (or attention-seeking bully), is transparent.

Excellent explications of victim-playing to “justify abuse of others” are presented by psychologist Tara Palmatier in her “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender” and “To the Victim Go the Spoils: False Allegations, Men as Default Scapegoats, and Why Some Women Get Away with Murder.”

Vis-à-vis victim-playing as a means of manipulation or as a coping strategy, this diagnosis by Dr. Palmatier is revealing: “People who abuse others maintain their power by keeping the truth of what they do secret. When you speak the truth, they begin to lose power and control. That’s what abusive personality types are after—power and control over you.” Restraining orders are unparalleled as tools for reengineering truth and dominating and silencing resistant victims. In fact, they may be the most effective instruments of coercion and revenge we’ve come up with yet. “Emotional abuse and bullying behaviors,” Dr. Palmatier elucidates, “are typical of those who have Borderline, Narcissistic, and/or Antisocial personality traits,” and victims of restraining order fraud by victim-players are urged to investigate the traits of the personality-disordered for correspondence with their own abusers and clues to their psychological motives.

The ambition of this post isn’t to say anything new but to connect a(nother) recognized human behavior to an unrecognized and commonly exploited method of abuse: restraining order fraud. As Dr. Zur observes, there’s an “unspoken, politically correct rule [in our culture] that the role of the victim…is NOT to be explored.” In other words—following the unexamined mantra, “Don’t blame the victim”—we’re not supposed to question “victimhood”; we’re supposed to sympathize and direct opprobrium toward the “offender.” The irony, of course, is that when victimhood is shammed, the actual victim is the mislabeled “offender.” And the unwillingness of society to acknowledge the sham is the agent of the victimization. Lies don’t victimize so much as our eagerness to credit them does. Victims of false allegations are victims of the state, not victims of liars. When restraining orders are abused, victims of that abuse may be stripped of home, children, property, career/livelihood, and (consequently) identity. And the beneficiaries of these losses, which are ones that may never be recovered from, are the victim-players. The “unspoken, politically correct rule” that Dr. Zur remarks not only rewards fraud and rapine; it ensures fraudsters are treated as objects of pity.

Restraining Orders and the Culture of Victimhood

March 6, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

It’s been posited, and I believe this is true, that women who are genuinely in fear only obtain restraining orders in dire extremity. Ironically, who posits this are deniers of high rates of false allegations.

If they’re right about the reluctance of abused women to seek intervention—and as I’ve said, I believe they are—what accounts for the fact that millions of restraining orders are obtained each year?

The obvious answer is that the majority of them are sought by people (predominately women but also men) who aren’t sincerely afraid for their safety at all.

Put another way, the woman who knows she has legitimate cause to fear for her safety (or her life and/or the lives of her children) may think twice, or many more times than that, before taking a step that she realizes could turn a bad situation into a much worse one. The paradigmatic female victim of domestic violence, for example, is often emotionally conflicted and cowed into submission, and it requires the summoning of a heroic burst of will to act in defiance of her abuser. By contrast, the woman who knows she has nothing to fear may not think at all before running to a judge, because she has no (real) concern for consequence.

Appreciating this, consider which of the two is going to more commonly be a restraining order applicant.

Right, the faker (opportunist, easy-outer, buck-passer, hysteric, bully, vengeance- or attention-seeker, crank, sociopath, neurotic, disordered personality, etc.).

Having read many accounts of male victims of domestic violence, what’s more, who to a man have taken the abuse sooner than applied to authorities or the courts for relief (or who’ve done so only to be treated with open disdain), I would venture to say that as with women, most men who apply for restraining orders have motives ulterior to “fear.”

They hype the extremity of their apprehension if not outright lie.

No one who hasn’t had firsthand experience with lies told to judges would believe how complacent the court is toward fraud. It’s embarrassing in fact to see how excited a judge may get when a witness is clearly and straightforwardly telling (admitting) the truth—as long, that is, as the truth s/he’s telling doesn’t conflict with how the judge wants to perceive the case. That judge may become positively giddy.

Contrariwise, judicial contempt toward inconvenient truths may be scalding, while obvious lies that jibe with the story the judge prefers may be slyly ignored and are never censured, let alone sanctioned.

It’s a game. More horrifying yet is that fraudsters will evince surprise if things don’t go entirely their way. Just as the child today who shouts “F* you!” in a public library and defies an adult to do anything about it knows he’s untouchable, so too do his degenerate adult counterparts know our basic moral formulas have been reversed in recent decades.

Witness the moral anomie exemplified by the coincidental ascendency of (“fair and balanced”) tabloid news channels. Impression has eclipsed fact as a critical standard. It’s okay to believe something because it suits us to.

It suits us, for instance, to exalt ourselves as “America the Brave” despite the fact that the approval of millions of restraining orders each year plainly signifies we’re a nation of victims.

Bullying: A Proposition for Psychological Study Inspired by Accounts of Restraining Order Abuse and Fraud

March 3, 2014January 22, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

I’ve just corresponded with another victim of tag-teaming involving false allegations made to authorities and the court that were augmented and exacerbated by false rumors and group threats made on Facebook, hyped protestations of fear and danger circulated among friends and family, etc.

This moved me to investigate whether there’s a label for this kind of misconduct and if group-bullying is a recognized social phenomenon.

What I discovered was that group-bullying certainly is a recognized social phenomenon among kids, and it’s one that’s given rise to the coinage cyberbullying and been credited with inspiring teen suicide. The clinical term for this conduct is relational aggression, and one of the forms it takes is defamation by spreading rumors and gossiping about its victim, or publicly humiliating him or her. We’re talking about the vulgar mischief most of us thought we’d escaped when we graduated from high school.

The restraining order process is paternal and infantilizing, and its use mirrors children’s running to adults to adjudicate a perceived or claimed injustice (which is among the reasons why such processes are objected to and derogated as demeaning to women by equity feminists like Camille Paglia). Among the consequences of the availability of restraining orders is the promotion of developmental reversion, a regression into adolescent or even pre-adolescent modes of behavior.

Explications of group-bullying don’t identify one gender or the other as the likelier abuser, though relational aggression is said (by Wikipedia) to have been primarily observed and studied among girls.

Bullies, despite being quite morally competent, tend to engage in morally wrong behaviors because of several reasons, including a lack of moral compassion. In general, bullies seem to engage in a kind of cold cognition and have a good theory of mind. They also have an average to good social intelligence. These skills seem to be especially important in order to use relational aggression in an instrumental manner—for achieving specific social goals. As mentioned previously, male and female bullies usually score differently on sociometric measures. Male bullies often fall in the socially rejected category while female bullies tend to fall in the controversial category. They can be popular yet not liked.

According to the group-bullying paradigm, you have the bully, or ringleader, and a number of orbital “bully-reinforcers and assistants,” besides peripheral outsiders who are less committal but may nevertheless participate.

Bully-reinforcers and assistants do not normally initiate aggressive actions themselves, but they support, reinforce, and/or assist the bully. They often have rather large friendship networks when compared to outsiders, victims, and their defenders. These individuals are similar to bullies in regards of their personal characteristics. Female bully-reinforcers and assistants usually score low on social acceptance and high on rejection by their peers while male bully assistants have average scores on both, and bully-reinforcers are often quite popular among their peers. The characteristic that is common among all these individuals across both genders is low level of empathy.

(I’ve been subject to this misconduct, including by two women who claim their own brothers were victims of false allegations by other women. Interestingly, this didn’t deter these “bully-reinforcers” from participating in the identical misconduct. I’m curious now to learn whether it’s the case that morally diminished or vacuous people tend to gravitate toward one another.)

It’s noteworthy, of course, that upon consideration of the personality-disordered, sociopaths, and bullies (in this context vis-à-vis restraining order abuse), the underlying character qualification that’s repeatedly echoed is “low level of empathy” (and clearly there may be overlap between these types, that is, an offender may be all three in one—in fact, I just learned a single person can have multiple personality disorders). It’s disturbingly noteworthy, what’s more, that though the quoted typologies in this discussion are meant to apply to children, adults will have no difficulty in recognizing other “adults” to whom they’re equally applicable. Deplorably, the “social goals” that motivate bullying by adults may be little different from those that inspire teens: revenge, self-exaltation or -advancement by alienation of another, dominance, attention-seeking, and/or sport.

The restraining order merits special inquiry by psychological researchers, because it (1) allows a bully or false accuser to make allegations outside of normal channels to judges who are, effectively, parental strangers (nullifying any potential for in-group contradiction or negative social fallout, including in work settings); (2) authorizes the bully or false accuser (and his or her minions) to then spread false rumors within normal channels that have received external and official validation; and (3) enables the bully or false accuser to many times more effectively arouse attention and third-party (outsider) participation, because his or her allegations have been officially (parentally) legitimated.

Because of its innate procedural prejudices and low evidentiary threshold (in cases, zero), the restraining order as a medium of lying is uniquely disinhibiting even while promising exorbitant rewards to a bully or false accuser. Incidence rates of false allegations derived from other contexts are therefore wrongfully expected to cross-apply to this medium and are extravagantly low by contrast.

That the recognized by-products of adolescent bullying, furthermore, including depression, difficulties in academic performance, and undermined feelings of competence may likewise manifest in adult victims of bullying but with the additional consequences of loss of employment or employability and familial disruption or dissolution makes the need for critical scrutiny of adult bullying facilitated and authorized by restraining order abuse that much more urgent.

Claiming Fear and Harassment to Terrorize and Harass: How to Deal with Serial Restraining Order Abuse

March 1, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Can anything be done when someone constantly gets TROs [temporary restraining orders] falsely…?”

—Search term leading to this blog

This conduct is properly labeled harassment and stalking, and (absurdly) deterrence of this conduct is properly achieved by applying to the court for a restraining order.

The court may be resistant to acknowledging that this sort of thing happens, but it’s in fact a wonder that it doesn’t happen on a larger scale. Restraining orders are free and easily got by claims of apprehension or by outright and calculated fraud, including false allegations of dismaying specificity or even manufactured evidence. (You can’t make this stuff up: I remember reading several years ago of a false accuser’s situating a chainsaw in her driveway and then summoning police to photograph the tableau, which she represented as a “warning” from an ex—vivid, indeed.)

Victims of serial restraining order petitioners must be assertive and present their cases reasonably. Harassment is, by definition, behavior that’s intended to disturb, disrupt, and wear down, and that’s repeated over time. As easy as it is for a crank or a sociopath to continuously obtain restraining orders, it nevertheless represents a very deliberate and sustained course of action that’s furthermore clearly evident of fixation (i.e., stalking).

Provided that a separate case is opened by the victim who alleges chronic harassment by restraining orders, the fact that his or her abuser applied for restraining orders against him or her first isn’t an obstacle.

Essential is showing a pattern of deviant and repetitively malicious misconduct.

Short of applying for a restraining order to arrest this misconduct, the value of which is to discredit false allegations a malicious accuser may make in the future, a victim’s only “easy” remedy is to relocate beyond a false accuser’s reach. Restraining orders may still be issued but cannot be served.

(Yes, dealing with these obscenities forces people to completely uproot their lives.)

Filing a lawsuit is always an option, but it’s never one easily realized, and a successful prosecution is very demanding and stressful, and is only reliably accomplished with the aid of an attorney, making it very expensive besides.

I live in the formerly Wild West. One brush with a nut who exploits the system this way makes you yearn for the lawless days when you could call someone into the street and settle a dispute with an expeditious showdown…and then grab a slice of pie at the diner while the undertaker tidied up.

“Something Is Very Wrong Here!”: On the “Amazing Ease of Obtaining a Restraining Order against Someone”

February 27, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 3 Comments

“I just wanted to alert you regarding the amazing ease of obtaining a restraining order against someone.

“I am a landlord, and on Jan. 22, I had the sheriff issue a tenant/roommate a ‘notice to quit’ by the end of the month. The tenant, in retaliation the very next day, requested from the courts that I be slapped with a restraining order and be ordered to stay 100 yards away from her. I guess, lucky for me, the judge did not grant her the 100 yards, which would have gotten me out of my own house.

“This is absolutely outrageous, because the document says the court finds that I ‘constitute a credible threat, that an imminent danger exists to the life and health of the protected persons named in this action.’

“So…if the judge believed the stuff my tenant wrote in her request, why in the world would I be allowed to stay at the house? Now I have to wait two weeks for my hearing to present my side of the story and bring my witnesses.

“I’ve even been advised by my lawyer to leave the house, even though I don’t have to, because who knows what the tenant might claim next?

“How does any landlord in Durango evict a tenant when all the tenant has to do is claim harassment, and the judge will slap a restraining order on the landlord? Something is very wrong here!”

—Letter to the Editor (Durango Herald)

Take a guess when this letter to the editor was published.

It could be 20 years ago. It could be yesterday. The outrage, in either case, would be the same, and its source would be the same. Probably even the phrasing on the injunction would be the same. And possibly the same judge could have issued it.

“I just wanted to alert you regarding the amazing ease of obtaining a restraining order against someone”: The writer’s earnestness is almost heartbreaking. Think any journalists will follow up? That he’ll inspire a series of editorials or investigative exposés? What’s impressive is that he believes he’s saying something new or that what he’s saying only applies to Durango, Colorado. Why it’s impressive is that what he’s saying isn’t common knowledge and of course should be, because it’s been said over and over and over for decades.

The proofreader will have corrected the writer’s grammar without really having appreciated what it is he’s said or its implications. The desk editor will have run his letter, because it’s marginally interesting and maybe not the kind of complaint s/he gets every day. Some readers will have assimilated the letter and registered an instance of crookedness. Some will nod the nod of those who’ve heard it all before.

The letter was published two weeks ago, and whatever limited impression it made will have already faded.

Fantasists Fatales: More on Narcissistic Sociopaths and Restraining Order Abuse to Gratify Stalkers’ Anger and Jealousy

February 27, 2014August 21, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Narcissistic people do fall in love, but they usually fall in love with being in love—and not with you. They crave the excitement of love, but are quickly disappointed when it becomes a relationship—and not just a trip into fantasy.”

—Mark Banschick, M.D.

In a recent post, I surveyed some scientific literature about stalking and narcissism, probably to excess, because qualification by experts makes arguments more palatable to a certain audience. That post’s epigraph, by two distinguished researchers, concluded that the motives of stalkers could be reduced in sum to anger and jealousy, both of which emotions are ones to which the narcissistic personality is pathologically prone.

Narcissistic stalkers are anomalous in their abuse of restraining orders (as they are in most respects). Some stalkers use restraining orders serially or as part of a campaign of harassment and attention-seeking, and not always against a current or former romantic partner or love interest. The same qualifications of anger and jealousy apply to the woman who torments a former boyfriend’s or husband’s new girlfriend, fiancée, or wife with restraining orders. Only last week, one such victim wrote to report that as soon as she got one restraining order quashed, another was petitioned.

The narcissistic stalker, by contrast, may pour all of his or her venom into one consummate fraud. The point is to get revenge and discard the offending threat to his or her ego-stability once that person’s use value has been exhausted. A false restraining order may simply represent the final blow that shifts the narcissist’s pathological courtship behavior onto its target. The narcissist walks and leaves his or her victim splayed in the dust.

Essential to bear in mind is that a relationship with a narcissist is always a one-way relationship and always confusing. The only person actually trying to relate is the person the narcissist targeted or baited; the narcissist can’t relate. The narcissist’s intentions—not necessarily understood as such by the narcissist him- or herself—were never real in the first place but based on fantasy fueled by the solicited attention and interest of the other person. Once that other person ceases to mirror back to the narcissist what s/he wants to see, that person is expendable. Some psychologists suggest, moreover, that in his or her paranoia about being rejected/abandoned, s/he may be motivated to act preemptively, that is, to reject first and thereby preserve his or her ego from an imagined injury.

Something I neglected to explicitly observe in the recent post referenced in the introduction that may merit observation is that all narcissists are stalkers (whether latent or active) insofar as the objects of narcissists’ romance fantasies are always merely objects to them (psycho-emotional gas pumps); they’re never subjects. What distinguishes the narcissistic stalker is that s/he’s seldom recognized for what s/he is, so s/he’s seldom rejected for what s/he is. Realize that the difference between normal pursuit behavior and aberrant pursuit behavior may be nothing more than how the pursued feels about it. Narcissists choose targets they perceive as vulnerable (empathic, tolerant, and pliable).

Because narcissists are extroverted, confident, aggressive, and socially commanding, “stalking” is seldom applied to their conduct. Narcissistic pursuit is by allure, false promise, and emotional coercion. The narcissist preys on the expectations of the cognitively normal, which s/he understands intuitively and manipulates with horrible proficiency. S/he often isn’t recognized as a user with no sincere investment in the other’s feelings until it’s too late.

To compound the difficulty either of making categorical pronouncements about narcissistic motives or exposing them, they’re not always known to narcissists themselves. To read most diagnostic explications of their mentality, the uninitiated would come away with the impression that narcissists are sharks, cunning, predatory automatons with false smiles and devious intentions. Anyone who’s had intimate and sustained relations with a narcissist, though, will perceive that s/he’s following what to him or her seem normal, romantic impulses in the moment. The difference is the narcissist is able to disown the moment with reptilian facility when his or her fantasy conflicts with interests of more pressing concern to the narcissist’s ego-preservation—or the interests of the other conflict with the narcissist’s fantasy.

It’s often argued that narcissists aren’t crazy, that they know what they’re doing. But this isn’t strictly so. In the throes of fantasy, narcissistic consciousness may be schizoid. Narcissists may lead parallel lives, even multiple parallel lives, like polygamists with spouses in different cities. And they may indulge an impulse with abandonment…then coldly—oh, so coldly—return to business as usual and plot the necessary steps to erase traces of the lapse. The narcissist runs either hot or cold. There is no warm.

Once the other fails to satisfy the psycho-emotional needs of the narcissist, corrupts his or her fantasy, or by intimacy threatens the autonomy of the narcissist or the reality s/he’s primarily invested in, the narcissist’s pathology is such that s/he can instantly blame the other (whom the narcissist targeted in the first place) for his or her perceived “betrayal.”

It’s at this stage that the anger and jealousy, identified as the germinal motives of the stalker, rear their scaly heads. For the narcissist, a restraining order may not only satisfy his or her lust to scourge and cripple his or her target; it may also be a way to satisfy jealousy: “Now no one else will have you.”

Revenge for the narcissist, too, is an impassioned fantasy. The preternatural vehemence of the narcissist is dismaying to its target. In a sense, though, it’s just a redirection of ardor that provides a different source of narcissistic supply. The restraining order process accommodates the narcissist exquisitely, allowing him or her to summon police like a dignitary and ham it up for a judge or several of them. S/he owns the spotlight. And once in possession of a restraining order, the spotlight will follow him or her wherever s/he wants.

The monstrous caricature of the other s/he’s authorized to present to friends, family, and acquaintances current and future serves as the perfect surrogate for the other. It delivers all of the attention while being free of any of the expectations.

Who or What Can’t Be Published on CafeMom?: On Ad Hominem Attacks, Feminist Hatemongering, and the Victimization of Moms by Both

February 24, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

I was concerned to see that someone was brought to this site recently by the search term “Tara Palmatier [X].” I’ve omitted the final word of the phrase not because it’s vulgar but because I don’t want an anomalous Google query to put an idea into the head of some crank with too much time on her hands.

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier is a psychotherapist whose writing I’ve come to admire and respect, and which I’ve consequently quoted many times. She has what distinguishes the brilliant from the intelligent: bold candor. I did a hasty Google search of my own to see what would have prompted someone to use the keywords cryptically quoted above and nothing correspondent appeared except a page that appeared to be a spoof.

I did, however, notice this post, published eight months ago, on CafeMom: “Just ‘Who’ or ‘What’ is Dr. Tara J. Palmatier?” (which was deleted subsequent to the publication of this post).

In several pieces I’ve published over the last couple of months, I’ve given critical scrutiny to feminist rhetoric, because I believe the gross civil injustices this blog concerns owe their ontological debt and perpetuation to such rhetoric.

Consider the rhetorical strategies of this writer, who identifies herself with a picture of a kitty cat and the alias “joyfree” (prompting this writer to wonder whether she’d be less catty if she were more joy-ful).

Note first that the question that titles the post disdains to recognize Dr. Palmatier as human. Why? Apparently because she wrote about women’s entrapping men by getting pregnant. Assuming she did, how this observation could be “one-sided against women” is baffling, not for the least of reasons because it’s impossible for men to entrap women by getting pregnant. The actual source of the beef, of course, isn’t its writer’s perception of Dr. Palmatier as unfair; it’s kneejerk resentment of a woman’s criticizing women. That’s why instead of offering a reasoned critical response, the writer simply denounces a (“supposed”) woman with a doctorate in clinical psychology as a “fake.” (William Buckley called this “rebuttal by epithet.”)

There’s little point in my spending an hour parsing (and thereby dignifying) the facile hatemongering of an anonymous writer who probably invested half that time cobbling her post together. What I would bring to the attention of this blog’s audience (particularly its female readers) is that this vitriol was published on a site called CafeMom. This isn’t a forum of radical feminist academicians; these are your everyday householders. And the question I would hope scrutiny of public statements like this arouses is when did it become okay to attack someone’s sexuality and qualification as a human being, because she voiced an eminently informed, professional opinion that wasn’t favorable to female exaltation?

If Dr. Palmatier were black, would it still be okay to suggest she wasn’t human? Not so much, right? Observe, though, that this writer’s rhetorical strategies (like those of any number of like-minded writers) pretty much mirror those of racial bigots of centuries past.

And it slides under the radar.

What shouldn’t slide under the radar of this blog’s readers is that the acceptability of these kinds of views is an indicator of the breadth of feminist influence, and it’s this coercive influence by women that allows this to continue (quoted from the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence”):

“My ex has used the law and the justice system, and destroyed my life and those of my minor children! He lied and said he had a witness to testify to his false accusations and bullied me into a deal with the devil eight months ago, and has filed five emergency ex parte motions to remove my kids…. He has put me in debt. I lost my job. I have no money, no friends. Therapists will not help my children as they are afraid he will ruin their lives, too…. Lawyers drop the case because of the constant verbal abuse he does to me and eventually to them, too. I have no friends left. Everyone has left me, and my family is far away, and their hands are tied. He has told teachers and principals and camp counselors these horrible accusations and caused me to have to move to a different town. My five-year-old told me his mind is telling him to die because his mommy is never happy. So what about the [woman] who [doesn’t] cry wolf and [leaves] an unhealthy marriage to save [her] kids and [has] a scorned, mentally ill, narcissistic ex-husband who is torturing every single day and using the law to harass [her]? He is a doctor and has deep pockets, and I am now in debt with no income. Had they been ethical the day of the hearing and admitted that they had no witness anymore, this would never have happened. So what about the tortured women?”

Over to you, CafeMom.

Targeted by a Narcissistic Sociopath: When a Stalker Obtains a Restraining Order to Dominate and Destroy

February 19, 2014August 21, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

“Accumulated forensic, clinical, and social research strongly suggests that the two most prominent emotions of most stalkers are anger and jealousy…. Such feelings are often consciously felt and acknowledged by the stalker. Nevertheless, these feelings often serve to defend the stalker against more vulnerable feelings that are outside of the stalker’s awareness. Anger can mask feelings of shame and humiliation, the result of rejection by the once idealized object, and/or feelings of loneliness, isolation, and social incompetency.

“Anger may also fuel the pursuit, motivated by envy to damage or destroy that which cannot be possessed…or triggered by a desire to inflict pain on the one who has inflicted pain, the primitive impulse of lex talionis, an eye for an eye.

“Angry pursuit can also repair narcissistic wounds through a fantasized sense of omnipotence and control of the victim. Victim surveys, in fact, have noted that the most common victim perception of the stalker’s motivations is to achieve control….”

—J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., and Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

This discussion’s epigraph is drawn from “Some Thoughts on the Neurobiology of Stalking” and touches on a number of the motives of restraining order abuse both by stalkers generally and, in particular, by those stalkers who are most vulnerable to narcissistic wounds, namely, pathological narcissists.

The narcissist is a living emotional pendulum. If [s/he] gets too close to someone emotionally, if [s/he] becomes intimate with someone, [s/he] fears ultimate and inevitable abandonment. [S/he], thus, immediately distances [him- or herself], acts cruelly, and brings about the very abandonment that [s/he] feared in the first place. This is called the ‘approach-avoidance repetition complex’ [Sam Vaknin, Ph.D., “Coping with Various Types of Stalkers: The Narcissist”].

While procurement of a restraining order is commonly perceived as the definitive act of rejection, possibly rejection of a stalker’s advances, it may in fact be an act of possession and control by a stalker (a perverse form of wish fulfillment). A restraining order indelibly stamps the presence of a stalker onto the public face of his or her target (“I own you”). It further disarms the target and mars his or her life, possibly to an extremity. Per Meloy and Fisher, a stalker achieves control and damages or destroys that which cannot be possessed. The “connection,” furthermore, can be repeatedly revisited and harm perpetually refreshed through exploitation of legal process.

The authors of the epigraph use the phrase attachment pathology. For a stalker who’s formed an unreciprocated attachment or an unauthorized one (as in the case of someone who’s married), a restraining order presents the treble satisfactions of counter-rejection (“I reject you back” or “I reject you back first”), revenge for not meeting the authoritarian expectations of the stalker, and possession/control. Procurement of a restraining order literally enables a false petitioner to revise the truth into one more favorable to his or her interests or wishes (cf. DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender). A judge is a rapt audience who only has the petitioner’s account on which to base his or her determination. The only “facts” that s/he’s privy to are the ones provided by the restraining order applicant.

In “Female Stalkers, Part 2: Checklist of Stalking and Harassment Behaviors,” psychologist Tara Palmatier identifies use of “the court and law enforcement to harass” as a female stalking tactic (“e.g., making false allegations, filing restraining orders, petitioning the court for frivolous changes in custody, etc.”), and this form of abuse likely is more typically employed by women against men (women tending “to be more ‘creatively aggressive’ in their stalking acts”). Anecdotal reports to this blog’s author, however, indicate that male stalkers (jilted or high-conflict exes and attention-seeking “admirers”) also engage in this form of punitive subversion against women. (Dr. Palmatier acknowledges as much but explains, “I tailor myself writing for a male audience.”)

Clinical terms for this kind of stalking—less stringent in their scope than legal definitions of stalking, which usually concern threat to personal safety—are “obsessive relational intrusion, intrusive contact, aberrant courtship behavior, obsessional pursuit, and unwanted pursuit behavior,” among others (Katherine S-L. Lau and Delroy L. Paulhus, “Profiling the Romantic Stalker”).

For someone with narcissistic personality disorder, someone, that is, who lives for attention (and is only capable of “aberrant courtship behavior”), a restraining order is a cornucopia, a source of infinitely renewing psychic nourishment, because it can’t fail to titillate an audience and excite drama.

(As noted in The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives, “Axis II personality disorders are…evident in a majority of stalkers, particularly Cluster B [which includes the narcissistic and borderline personality-disordered]”).

Per the DSM-IV, a narcissist evinces:

A. A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

4. Requires excessive admiration.

5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Correspondences between this clinical definition and what might popularly be regarded as the traits of a stalker are uncanny (e.g., preoccupation with fantasies of “ideal love,” dependence on admiration not necessarily due, interpersonal exploitation, and an inability to identify with or a disregard for others’ feelings). It further suggests why a narcissist wouldn’t scruple about abusing legal process to realize malicious ends.

In “Threatened Egotism, Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Direct and Displaced Aggression: Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Lead to Violence?”, psychologists Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister observe that aggressively hurtful behavior is more likely to originate from narcissistic arrogance than from insecurity:

[I]t has been widely asserted that low self-esteem is a cause of violence (e.g., Kirschner, 1992; Long, 1990; Oates & Forrest, 1985; Schoenfeld, 1988; Wiehe, 1991). According to this theory, certain people are prompted by their inner self-doubts and self-dislike to lash out against other people, possibly as a way of gaining esteem or simply because they have nothing to lose.

A contrary view was proposed by Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996). On the basis of an interdisciplinary review of research findings regarding violent, aggressive behavior, they proposed that violence tends to result from very positive views of self that are impugned or threatened by others. In this analysis, hostile aggression was an expression of the self’s rejection of esteem-threatening evaluations received from other people.

The DSM-5 notes that for the narcissist, “positive views of self” are everything (and others’ feelings nothing). Diagnostic criteria are:

A. Significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by:

1. Impairments in self functioning (a or b):

a. Identity: Excessive reference to others for self-definition and self-esteem regulation; exaggerated self-appraisal may be inflated or deflated, or vacillate between extremes; emotional regulation mirrors fluctuations in self-esteem.

b. Self-direction: Goal-setting is based on gaining approval from others; personal standards are unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional, or too low based on a sense of entitlement; often unaware of own motivations.

AND

2. Impairments in interpersonal functions (a or b):

a. Empathy: Impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others; excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self; over- or underestimate of own effect on others.

b. Intimacy: Relationships largely superficial and exist to serve self-esteem regulation; mutuality constrained by little genuine interest in others’ experiences and predominance of a need for personal gain.

B. Pathological personality traits in the following domain:

1. Antagonism, characterized by:

a. Grandiosity: Feelings of entitlement, either overt or covert; self-centeredness; firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others; condescending toward others.

b. Attention seeking: Excessive attempts to attract and be the focus of the attention of others; admiration seeking.

The picture that emerges from clinical observations of the narcissistic personality is one of a person who has no capacity to identify with others’ feelings, a fantastical conception of love, and unreasonable expectations of others and an irrational antagonism toward those who disappoint his or her wishes.

It’s further commonly observed that narcissists’ antagonism toward anyone whom they perceive as critical of them—that is, as a threat to their “positive views of self”—is boundless. The object, then, of a narcissist’s attachment pathology who rejects him or her (disappointing his or her “magical fantasies”), who challenges his or her entitlement, or who manifests disdain or condescension toward the narcissist (even in the form of sympathy) becomes instead the object of the narcissist’s wrath. As psychologist Linda Martinez-Lewi notes, “For the narcissist, revenge is sweet. It’s where they live in their delusional, treacherous minds.”

Narcissists adopt a predictable cycle of Use, Abuse, Dispose. This pathological repetition can last a few weeks or decades…. With a narcissist, there is never an authentic relationship. He/she is a grandiose false self without conscience, empathy, or compassion. Narcissists are ruthless and exploitive to the core [Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D., “Narcissistic Relationship Cycle: Use, Abuse, Dispose”].

The restraining order process, because it enables a petitioner to present a false self and caters to fraudulent representation, is a medium of vengeance ideally suited to a narcissistic stalker. Its exploitation plays to a narcissist’s strengths: social savvy, cunning, and persuasiveness. Its value as an instrument of abuse, furthermore, is unmatched, offering for a minimal investment of time and energy the rewards of public disparagement and alienation of his or her victim, as well as impairment of that victim’s future prospects.

There are sociopathic narcissists who will not be satisfied until their ‘enemy’ is completely vanquished—emotionally, psychologically, financially. They seek revenge, not for what has been done to them but [for] what they perceive in a highly deluded way…has been done to them [Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D., “Sociopathic Narcissists—Relentlessly Cruel”].

Fraudulent abuse of legal process elevates the narcissistic stalker to prime mover and puppet-master over his or her prey and compensates his or her disappointment of “ideal love” with the commensurate satisfactions of “unlimited power” over his or her victim and an infinitely renewable source of ego-fueling attention. By his or her false representations to the court, the narcissist’s fantasies become “the truth.” S/he’s literally able to refashion reality to conform to the false conception s/he favors.

In conclusion, an observation by psychologist Stanton Samenow:

The narcissist may not commit an act that is illegal, but the damage [s/he] does may be devastating. In fact, because the narcissist appears to be law-abiding, others may not be suspicious of him [or her] leaving him [or her] freer to pursue his [or her] objectives, no matter at whose expense. I have found that the main difference between the narcissist and antisocial individual, in most instances, is that the former has been shrewd or slick enough not to get caught…breaking the law.

Why Women Are Abused by the Restraining Order Process So Easily

February 15, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

People—brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, lovers, spouses, exes, and strangers—abuse women with false restraining orders for the same reason rapists abuse women: because they can. And the reason why women are so easily abused by malicious prosecutors is that the restraining order process is the bowling alley of jurisprudence.

Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down.

Women are abused by restraining orders, because restraining order policy is lax and prejudiced in favor of applicants. Why? Because women are abused.

Sound circular? It is. The social push to address violations against women, agitated by galvanic denunciations of “rape culture” and domestic violence, has unwittingly contributed to violations against women.

Rape and domestic violence happen. There’s no question about it. There’s likewise no question that their effects may be damaging beyond either qualification or quantification.

The overwhelming majority of rapes represent sexual violence against women by men. Social perception to the contrary notwithstanding, however, victims of domestic violence may be of either gender, and the ratio is nearly 50-50.

Perception is the operative word here, and perception is the preeminent concern of this blog, because it’s what informs the bias for plaintiffs and against defendants (of both genders) that’s customary to the restraining order process.

The precedent for this bias reaches back three decades to the institution of the process as a deterrent to domestic violence against women, and the influence exerted by second-wave feminists since has only reinforced the bias to the extent that anyone who’s accused on a restraining order, male or female, is considered guilty, ipso facto.

To assert guilt, in a majority of cases, is to “prove” guilt.

Beyond satisfying social expectations, the court must satisfy its ethical obligation, so guilt is presumed not just of male defendants on restraining orders but of all defendants on restraining orders (to make the process “fair”).

A significant number, if not the majority, of respondents to this blog who report being the victims of false allegations on restraining orders—particularly the ones who detail their stories at length—are women. This doesn’t mean that women, who represent less than 20% of restraining order defendants, are more commonly the victims of false allegations. It’s indicative, rather, of women’s disposition to socially connect and express their pain, indignity, and outrage. (Women, furthermore, aren’t perceived as dangerous and deviant, so they feel less insecure about publicly declaiming their innocence; they have the greater expectation of being believed and receiving sympathy.)

The irony is that it’s this same disposition, the disposition to engage with others and ventilate suffering, that has given feminist propaganda such emotive force, force that has spawned the prejudices endemic to the restraining order process that have trashed these women’s lives.

The metaphor that inevitably presents itself to the writer who contemplates restraining order injustice is the knot, and I’ve used it more than once.

Abuse of restraining orders, which originate with gender loyalty, is sustained by gender loyalty. Who do women who’ve been abused by male restraining order plaintiffs resent? Men. Who do the feminist advocates for restraining orders resent? Men. Who makes it so easy for restraining order plaintiffs to total the lives of female victims of false allegations (including mothers and grandmothers), possibly leaving them destitute besides psychologically shattered? Women.

This is the vicious circle of misattributed blame that has preserved an unjust process from scrutiny and reform.

And this discussion circles back on itself by reintroducing perception as the ultimate culprit.

Victims of restraining order abuse only recognize the immediate causes of their torment: the scabby liars who falsely accused them and the cruel, careless, or clueless judges who validated their false accusers’ lies.

The invisible, germinal cause of that torment is the demonization of men as rapists and batterers. The restraining order process is both fueled and funded by this perception, and until this perception is more actively challenged by women, particularly by women who’ve been victimized by its effects on public policy, the self-perpetuating cycle of grief will grind on.

“Can Someone Get a Restraining Order Against Me if [Fill in the Blank]?” YES.

February 14, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

If you imagine there are hard-and-fast rules that apply to what a judge can issue a restraining order for, think again. Grounds for establishing “harassment” or vague emotional allegations like fear need only be their plaintiffs’ assertion. Plaintiffs don’t even need to assert apprehension. A judge may ask, “Are you afraid of him/her?” To be granted a restraining order, a plaintiff may only have to chirp, “Yes.”

That’s it? That’s it. Allegations including stalking, battery, and sexual harassment or violence can be made and publicly recorded on a restraining order (indefinitely) based on no concrete proof, and they can be made against men or women.

The conceit is that judges are held to standards of fairness, diligence, etc., but the truth is that the issuance of restraining orders is discretionary, that is, a judge can do what s/he wants. The predominant inclination, what’s more, is to assume where there’s smoke there’s fire. And, yes, a restraining order can also be upheld on appeal on no basis, and judges can reduce innocent defendants to cinders and face no repercussions for it.

Search-term queries that lead visitors here often begin with “Can.” The questions invariably translate to “What’s necessary for authorization?” The answer is nothing. To act is to act with authorization. Restraining orders can be issued on no basis at all other than that they were petitioned, and the process was famously criticized for its availability to all comers fully 20 years ago by Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association—to little effect.

The abuse industry that has cropped up around the restraining order is an extremely lucrative one for the people who service it, including officers and staff of courts and police districts; attorneys and mediators; therapists and anger management counselors; shelters and social workers, etc. Google restraining order + false allegations + attorney + your state, and you’ll discover from the returns that any number of law firms recognize restraining orders are falsely issued and are there to help you beat a bad rap…for a price.

The number of restraining orders issued each year is already two to three million (in the U.S. alone). Were it not for the uncertainty reflected in questions that begin, “Can,” it’s a good bet that that number would be significantly larger.

False Allegations of Rape: A Digression into Taboo Territory from Talking back to the Usual Sorts of False Allegations Made on Restraining Orders

February 12, 2014August 21, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

The prevalence of false allegations of rape is contested. What isn’t contested by anyone is that false allegations of rape are made, and what shouldn’t be contested by anyone is that false allegations of rape (and any number of other offenses) are heinous lies that may end life as they knew it for the falsely accused.

The specter invoked by “rape culture” is what informs public perceptions of allegations of fear and violence made on restraining orders, and has prompted the operant conditioning to which authorities and judges have been subjected for decades and which translates to an accused’s being presumed guilty on little or no more basis than that an accusation was made. So influential has rhetoric like this been that most or all allegations made on restraining orders are perceived as valid, urgent, and sinister, whether they’re made against men or women. Police officers and judges have been conditioned to react reflexively instead of critically in these cases, and they’ve been authorized, moreover, to view and treat the accused with contempt.

Acknowledging that false allegations are made doesn’t discount the reality and trauma of rape, nor does it excuse the act; it isn’t a concession to the “enemy.” Not acknowledging that false allegations are made, however, does make light of human torment and is inexcusable. Also, it’s false accusers, more than anyone, who discredit and mock the trauma of real victims; and for this reason, they should be the targets of feminist ire, instead of those who advocate for the victims of false accusers.

Statistics reported by Cathy Young, whose journalistic integrity is unimpeachable, conservatively put false allegations of rape at 9% (as computed by the FBI). It’s often posited that many more rapes occur than are reported, which is no doubt true. So the percentage of false allegations relative to the number of actual rapes may be less than 9%. This, though, is a misleading observation that mixes apples and oranges. Unreported rapes have nothing to do with the fact that a conservatively estimated 9% of alleged rapes are falsely alleged rapes.

A consideration that isn’t statistically irrelevant, furthermore, is that some false allegations of rape aren’t recognized as false.

To a feminist, even a 9% false-allegation rate is deemed negligible. Maybe it’s statistically negligible—and that’s a BIG maybe—but people aren’t statistics. That nine in a hundred represents nine people. In 1,000 cases, that’s 90 people. In 10,000 cases, that’s 900 people.

According to Wikipedia, “Nearly 90,000 people reported being raped in the United States in 2008.”

What’s evident in the slant of writing that discounts false allegations of rape is that the lives of the falsely accused are somehow less important than the lives of rape victims. Categorically, they are not, and concluding otherwise betrays what psychologists call “emotional reasoning.” The falsely accused have no relationship either to the victims or perpetrators of rape whatsoever.

Falsely accused = innocent.

What’s implicit in the slant of writing that discounts false allegations of rape is that the victims of those allegations are men, and men having it coming to them anyway.

This manner of thinking is wrong. Like a rape victim, someone falsely accused of rape (or anything else) is someone who is guiltless. Period. (S)he is not accountable, by any sane standard, for the actions of rapists (or other offenders). Period.

Thinking to the contrary has infected the perceptions of our administrators, legislators, judges, and police officers to the lasting detriment of every man who’s falsely accused of anything. And not just every man who’s falsely accused. The propagandist rhetoric generated by this thinking is lethal, and it has corrupted our system and our social conscience to their marrows.

Victims of false allegations are casualties—casualties—not trivia.

The Modern-Day Witch Trial: On Using a Restraining Order to Accuse a Mother of Rape

February 9, 2014July 1, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

The last post addressed the case of a mom who’s been accused of serial rape by the father of one of her children.

Ignore whether it’s okay to allow a man’s record to be contaminated with an uncorroborated allegation of rape scrawled on a restraining order application—an allegation, incidentally, that will ruin his life (there’s not an employer on the face of the planet who’s going to respond to “She accused me of rape” with “Oh, fiddlesticks. When can you start?”).

Ignore that and consider what judge, in the “bad old days” before restraining orders existed, would have allowed a woman to be publicly labeled a rapist, merely by implication.

Now consider how far back in history we’d have to reach to find a time when such an unfounded allegation would previously have been taken seriously. I’m not a historian, but my guess would be during the period when we last had witch trials.

It was probably possible, say, as recently as the 1600s to have a woman tried as a succubus (a demon in female form who forcibly copulated with men while they slept) just based on “persuasive” testimony like “She consorts with the devil!”

Our modern-day witch trials, restraining order adjudications, which proceed from the same non-evidentiary basis, don’t threaten penalties like drowning or incineration. I wonder, though, whether their draconian punishments were the only aspects of the original witch trials that were unjust.

Restraining Orders Are Heroin: On Feminists, “Rape Culture,” and Affliction Addiction

February 7, 2014July 1, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

“I have known my ex since 2007, and our relationship was never easy. I stood with him during the affairs, the lies, whatever…. We had a child in 2009, and then the violence started…. After the last failed mediation in Nov[ember] 2012, he again wanted to get back together, [and] I was hit with a new motion to change the parenting time for our child, and he stated that I was harming or endangering our child.

“In Jan[uary] 2013, he again wanted us to work [things] out, and I again agreed…. I began to assist with bills, his house, [and] accommodating his requests with our child. Fast forward to Oct[ober] 2013…after learning once again there were other women involved and accepting his apology at dinner one night, the next day I was served with a temp[orary] restraining order. It was filled with a whole lot of false allegations and a report that he filed with the police. The report with the police came back unfounded, and shortly after that report was put into evidence, he filed an addendum to his original…restraining order in Nov[ember] 2013, adding on 38 more individual allegations dating back to 2007 from when we first met.

“In mid-Nov[ember] 2013, he then filed an additional complaint against [me] through military channels…. He has also filled more in [on] our parenting-time case against me.

“He is now stating that since 2007, he feels I have been forcing him into sex, and he may now need to seek therapy after learning how often he has been raped.

“Since the restraining order has been in effect, my ex has contacted my family, has [had] his new [girlfriend] file complaints with me at my job, has filed additional allegations with my job, and is now saying I am an unfit parent.

“I just am unsure where to turn…or what to do. If this restraining order is found to go permanently against me, I have more to lose with my career and way of providing for my children, and though he is aware of this, he is also not backing down. And now with his new allegations in court about the forced sexual encounters for years, his feelings of being afraid, and his claim that he will need to seek therapy, I am not sure how all of this will play out against me.”

—Blog respondent

I recently acquainted myself with “rape culture,” a term used ubiquitously in feminist screeds, and observed that there’s a contrary case to be made for its being applied to the defenders of court-mediated villainies that emotionally scourge innocents and cripple their lives.

The woman whose story serves as epigraph to this discussion is one such victim. Here’s a woman, a mother, moreover, who has endured beastly treatment with the patience of Job only to be labeled a rapist, terrorist, unfit mother, etc., etc. and who now faces the prospect of having her entire existence tweezed apart.

With regard to so-called rape culture, consider that this woman’s story shows that not only may false allegations of rape be readily put over on the courts through restraining order abuse; it isn’t just men who can be falsely accused.

Maybe feminist readers of this woman’s saga of pain would only conclude that it wasn’t impressed upon her early enough that women need men like fish need bicycles. Or maybe they’d conclude that it just goes to show how awful men can be, disregarding that the woman has also been persecuted by her ex’s new girlfriend.

In fact, what it and any number of others’ ordeals show is that when you offer people an easy means to excite drama and conflict, they’ll exploit it.

There’s a reason why opiates are carefully controlled substances that aren’t freely handed out to everyone who claims to need them for pain relief. If they were, a lot of people would welcome a cheap high.

Process abusers need to be recognized for what they are: substance abusers. Restraining orders, whose injustices persist because they’re vehemently championed by ideologues, are dispensed gratuitously and used gratuitously. For too many users, what’s more, they’re gateway drugs that whet an insatiable, predatory appetite.

Drama and attention junkies are no different from any other kind. Offer them a free narcotic, and they’ll take it and jones for more.

Defenders of restraining orders, who think of them as fixes, don’t realize how right they are.

DARVO and the Diva: A Hypothetical Case in Point of Restraining Order Abuse to Reverse the Roles of Victim and Offender

February 5, 2014August 10, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

“False allegations and bogus calls to the police are an extremely sick form of abuse.”

—Tara J. Palmatier, Psy.D.

I introduced a useful term in my previous post coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd and adapted by psychologist Tara Palmatier to her own practice and professional writing: DARVO, an acronym of Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

In sum, the abuser in a relationship denies a behavior s/he’s called on, attacks his or her confronter (the victim of the behavior), and by social manipulation (including false allegations, hysterical protestations, smear tactics, etc.) reverses roles with him or her: the batterer becomes the beaten, the stalker becomes the stalked, the sexual harasser becomes the sexually harassed, etc.

The restraining order process and DARVO are a jigsaw-puzzle fit, because the first party up the courthouse steps is recognized as the victim, that party’s representations are accepted as “the truth,” a restraining order is easily got with a little dramatic legerdemain, and procurement of a restraining order instantly qualifies its plaintiff as the victim and its defendant as the villain in the eyes of nearly everybody. In one fell swoop, the exploiter dodges accountability for his or her misconduct and punishes his or her victim for being intolerant of that misconduct.

To illustrate, a conjectural case in point:

Imagine that a solitary, bookish man, a starving but striving artist working on a project for children, haplessly attracts a group of overeducated and neglected women keen for recognition and attention. Their leader, a brassy, charismatic, married woman, works her wiles on the man to indulge an infatuation, contriving reasons to hang around his house up to and past midnight. He lives remotely, and the secluding darkness and intimacy are delicious and allow the woman to step out of the strictures of her daytime life as easily as she slips off her wedding ring and mutes her cellphone.

Her coterie of girlfriends is transposed straight from the halls of high school. They’re less physically favored than the leader of their pack and content to warm themselves in her aura. The adolescent intrigue injects some color into their treadmill lives, and they savor the vicarious thrill of the hunt. The man is a topic of their daily conversation. The women feel young again for a few months, like conspirators in an unconsummated teen crush.

Eventually, however, the creeping finger of consequence insinuates itself between the pages of the women’s Harlequin-novel holiday, and the game is a lark no more. Realizing the ruse can’t be maintained indefinitely, the married woman abruptly vanishes, and her cronies return where they came from like shadows retreating from the noonday sun.

What no one knows can’t hurt them.

The man, though, nevertheless learns of the deception and confronts the woman in a letter, asking her to meet with him so he can understand her motives and gain some closure. The woman denies understanding the source of his perplexity and represents him (to himself) as a stalker. She then proceeds to represent him as such to her peers at his former place of work and then to her husband, the police, and the court over a period of days and weeks. She publicly alleges the man sexually harassed her, is dangerous, and poses a threat to her and her spouse, and to her friends and family.

Her co-conspirators passively play along. It’s easy: out of sight, out of mind.

The life of the man who’d hospitably welcomed the strangers, shaking hands in good faith and doling out mugs of cheer, is trashed: multiple trips to the police precinct to answer false charges and appeals to the court that only invite censure and further abuse. His record, formerly that of an invisible man, becomes hopelessly corrupted. His artistic endeavor, a labor of love that he’d plied himself at for years and on which he’d banked his future joy and financial comfort, is predictably derailed.

The women blithely return to realizing their ambitions while the man’s life frays and tatters.

Sleepless years go by, the economy tanks, and the man flails to simply keep afloat. The paint flakes on his house and his hopes. His health deteriorates to the extent that he’s daily in physical pain. He finally employs an attorney to craft a letter, pointlessly, undertakes a lawsuit on his own, too late, and maunders on like this, alternately despairing and taking one stab or another at recovering his life and resuscitating his dreams.

The married woman monitors him meanwhile, continuing to represent him as a stalker, both strategically and randomly to titillate and arouse attention, while accruing evidence for a further prosecution, and bides her time until the statute of limitation for her frauds on the court lapses to ensure that she’s immune from the risk of punishment. A little over seven years to the day of her making her original allegations, she takes the man to court all over again, enlisting the ready cooperation of one of her former confederates, to nail the coffin shut.

This is DARVO at its most dedicated and devotional, and it’s pure deviltry and exemplifies the dire effects and havoc potentially wrought by a court process that’s easily and freely exploited and indifferently administered.

In her explication of DARVO, Dr. Palmatier introduces this quotation from attorney and mediator William (Bill) Eddy: “It’s only the Persuasive Blamers of Cluster B [see footnote] who keep high-conflict disputes going. They are persuasive, and to keep the focus off their own behavior (the major source of the problem), they get others to join in the blaming.” As a scenario like the one I’ve posited above illustrates, persuasive blame-shifters may keep high-conflict clashes going for years, clashes that in their enlistment of others verge on lynch-mobbing that includes viral and virulent name-calling and public denigration.

Consider the origins of consequences that cripple lives and can potentially lead to physical violence, including suicide or even homicide, and then consider whether our courts should be the convenient tools of such ends. Absent our courts’ availability as media of malice, the appetite of the practitioner of DARVO would starvo.

Dr. Tara Palmatier: “Cluster B disorders include histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. At their core, I believe all Cluster B disorders stem from sociopathy (i.e., lack of empathy for others, refusal to hold themselves accountable for their behaviors, and exploitation of others). Bleiberg (2001) refers to these characterological disorders as ‘severe,’ because they chronically engage in extreme conflict [and] drama, and cause the most problems in society.”

Shifting Blame: DARVO, Personality Disorders, and Restraining Order Abuse

February 1, 2014June 23, 2023Moderator 20 Comments

“DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing…display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser’s credibility or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

—Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D.

I discovered this quotation and the acronym it unpacks in Dr. Tara Palmatier’s “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender,” one of the most validating explications of the motives of false accusers I’ve read. There’s nothing in it that I can’t identify with personally, and I’ve heard from many others who I know would respond similarly.

DARVO seems to be a combination of projection, denial, lying, blame-shifting, and gaslighting…. It also seems to be common behavior in most predators, bullies, high-conflict individuals, and/or abusive personality-disordered individuals.

Goaded by some instances of blame-shifting that screamed at me from the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” I recently wrote about “Role Reversal: Using Restraining Orders to Conceal Misconduct and Displace Blame.” I even referred to Dr. Palmatier’s work in the post, not yet having come across the above-mentioned entry in her own blog, which incisively exposes the origins of false motives.

Dr. Palmatier is a psychologist who specializes in treating male victims of domestic violence and abuse, but the behaviors she elucidates aren’t gender-specific, and both male and female victims of blame-shifting will be edified by her revelations, among them “why many Narcissists, Borderlines, Histrionics, and Antisocials effectively employ smear-campaign and mobbing tactics when they target someone” (“By blaming others for everything that’s wrong in their lives, they keep the focus off the real problem: themselves”).

At least a few visitors are brought here daily by an evident interest in understanding the motives of personality-disordered individuals—usually their spouses, lovers, or exes—who’ve obtained restraining orders against them by fraud or otherwise abused them through the courts. If you’re such a reader, consider whether this sounds familiar:

The offender takes advantage of the confusion we have in our culture over the relationship between public provability and reality (and a legal system that has a certain history in this regard) in redefining reality. Future research may test the hypothesis that the offender may well come to believe in [his or her] innocence via this logic: if no one can be sure [s/he] is guilty then logically [s/he] is not guilty no matter what really occurred. The reality is thus defined by public proof, not by personal lived experience [quoting Dr. Freyd].

So thorough and laser-sighted is Dr. Palmatier’s topical treatment of “[a]busive, persuasive blamers [who] rely on the force of their emotions to sell their lies, half-truths, and distortions” that there’s little point in my repeatedly quoting it and adding my two cents, but I eagerly bring it to the attention of those who’ve been attacked through the courts by abusers who used them as scapegoats to mask their own misconduct.

Dr. Palmatier remarks, “This behavior is crazy-making if you are the target of it.” If you respond, Amen—and especially if you respond, F*ckin’ A!men—read this.

“Truth,” Ms. Magazine, and Restraining Order Allegations

January 31, 2014July 30, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

In a recent post, I commented on a 2010 entry on the Ms. Magazine Blog whose writer evinced no awareness either of how false allegations work or how damaging they can be, and that advocated for laxer restraining order laws in Maryland. Even if this writer were capable of conceding that false allegations are made, it’s unlikely that she could intuit a subtlety like this: allegations don’t even have to be lies to be frauds. It’s for this reason, not least of all, that higher standards and expectations of verification, equity, and deliberation must be applied to the civil restraining order process.

Consider this scenario:

A man eyes a younger, attractive woman at work every day. She’s impressed by him, also, and reciprocates his interest. They have a brief sexual relationship that, unknown to her, is actually an extramarital affair, because the man is married. The younger woman, having naïvely trusted him, is crushed when the man abruptly drops her, possibly cruelly, and she then discovers he has a wife. Maybe she openly confronts him at work. Maybe she calls or texts him. Maybe repeatedly. The man, concerned to preserve appearances and his marriage, applies for a restraining order alleging the woman is harassing him, has become fixated on him, is unhinged. As evidence, he provides phone records, possibly dating from the beginning of the affair—or pre-dating it—besides intimate texts and emails. He may also provide tokens of affection she’d given him, like a birthday card the woman signed and other romantic trifles, and represent them as unwanted or even (implicitly) disturbing. “I’m a married man, Your Honor,” he testifies, admitting nothing, “and this woman’s conduct is threatening my marriage, besides my status at work.”

Question: Where’s the lie?

The woman, who had fallen for this man, may have been desperate for an explanation for his betrayal, reasonably expecting the man who had courted her with flowers and sweet nothings to reemerge. Maybe she becomes incensed by his disowning his deception, and angrily takes him to task. He may genuinely feel harassed and alarmed by her not simply going away after giving him what he wanted from the relationship, because his marriage and reputation are at stake. His evidence is real. He doesn’t explicitly use the word “stalker”; he just lets the facts speak for him. In a literal sense, he’s telling the truth.

Not so cut-and-dried, is it?

This scenario isn’t fantasy. It roughly corresponds to a story that was shared with me by a woman who had just begun a promising career in law and had bright and lofty ambitions she’d toiled many years to realize. The job she aspired to have is one from which she’s been permanently disqualified by the man’s having (very easily) obtained a restraining order against her to mask his own misconduct and punish her for not minding her place.

In 10 years, the woman, a 20-something attorney who had set her sights on working for the FBI, may instead be a recovering alcoholic working for Legal Aid. Her lover, by contrast, may have made partner at her former law firm. The seniors there may sometimes jokingly speculate, sipping from lowballs and puffing on stogies, about what became of “that crazy stalker who used to work here.”

If this is the justice Ms. Magazine advocates for, it needs a new name.

Rhetoric and Restraining Order Rampancy

January 30, 2014July 6, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Rape culture exists because we don’t believe it does. From tacit acceptance of misogyny in everything from casual conversations with our peers to the media we consume, we accept the degradation of women and posit uncontrollable hyper-sexuality of men as the norm. But rape is endemic to our culture because there’s no widely accepted cultural definition of what it actually is.”

—The Nation Magazine (February 4, 2013)

I’m not certain I even know what this means. Rhetorically, though, it’s impressive. In a single sentence, its writers “establish” that we are all of their party and that something exists, because we don’t believe it does.

I won’t pretend to know anything about The Nation, but does a position like this pass for responsible journalism? I’ve surveyed a lot of this kind of writing recently, and it alarms me for more than just the reasons that I (1) don’t believe we do “accept the degradation of women,” (2) don’t believe that rape is “endemic to our culture” any more than it is endemic to the animal kingdom, and (3) do believe the definition of rape is pretty clearly and universally understood.

What the writers mean, I guess, is that rape culture, which they haven’t established exists in the first place, continues to exist, because we unknowingly contribute to its perpetuation by saying and doing things that we are not aware reveal our unconscious hatred of women. You didn’t know you hated women? Well, you do.

We all do, apparently. And shame on us for it.

You see how this rhetoric works. It’s more than just assertive; it’s coercive. A lot of it also betrays patently false reasoning that masks what’s actually propagandist badgering. The source of its outrage is sympathetic; how it expresses that outrage is significantly less so.

Consider this line of argument: “When an instance of sexual assault makes the news and the first questions the media asks [sic]are about the victim’s sobriety, or clothes, or sexuality, we should all be prepared to pivot to ask, instead, what messages the perpetrators received over their lifetime about rape and about ‘being a man.’ Here’s a tip: the right question is not, ‘What was she doing/wearing/saying when she was raped?’ The right question is, ‘What made him think this is acceptable?’”

“During the postwar period of Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877), many white writers argued that without slavery—which supposedly contained their animalistic tendencies—blacks were reverting to criminal savagery. The brute caricature portrayed black men as threatening menaces, fiends, and sociopaths, and as hideous, terrifying predators who targeted helpless victims, especially white women.”

(Note the Freudian slip: “an instance” has “perpetrators,” plural. It’s not for nothing that some have perceived in writing like this the tacit belief that all men are rapists.)

First, how has the postulated “instance of sexual assault” been qualified as such? These writers presume that an incident is an “assault” with a “victim.” The overwhelming likelihood in a case like this is that it is what it appears to be, but it’s not the job of investigators, including journalists, to equate appearances with facts. There are no “right” questions. Some questions may be tactful, some rude or insensitive, some effective at exposing the truth, some less so. The value or “rightness” of a question can only be judged in hindsight, as writers for a news magazine should know.

If all journalists shared these writers’ jaundiced perspective or felt constrained to only ask “appropriate” questions, how many instances of false allegations should we imagine would ever be recognized, let alone sanctioned? I have an interest in false allegations, and the answer to this question disturbs me.

I’ve surveyed studies of the incidence rate of false allegations of rape, and I have no reluctance allowing for argument’s sake that rape is rarely alleged falsely. What I have a problem with is the non-recognition of the harm that’s wrought when rape is alleged falsely—and no one argues that this never happens. The life of an innocent may be destroyed. And we will have destroyed it.

A rape is a fait accompli. Before we know about it, it’s done. Falsely prosecuting someone for rape (or anything else), however, isn’t a case of a bad person doing a bad thing. It’s a case of bringing the full weight and menace of the state to bear on an innocent person. Prosecution is a choice that we are all answerable for.

Although the writers would argue the contrary (and do), society isn’t accountable for the actions of individuals. It is, however, accountable for the actions of its elected officials, agents, and representatives. We are accountable, and we collectively must be guided by a higher moral standard than any one individual. We craft laws and policy, and we have an ethical responsibility to ensure laws and policy are fair and scrupulously applied.

This blog isn’t about rape. But what it is about, restraining order abuse, is a product of the rhetoric exemplified by the article I’ve criticized. Propagandist writing about harassment isn’t what keeps eyes diverted from restraining order injustice, and it isn’t what has spawned the “abuse industry.” Writing about violence against women has.

I could argue that restraining order abuse exists because we don’t believe it does. But it’s more clearly said that it exists because we believe the propaganda—or are too intimidated to scrutinize or take exception to it.

“Rape Culture” and Restraining Order Abuse

January 29, 2014July 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“During the early 1970s, feminists began to engage in consciousness-raising efforts to educate the public about the reality of rape. Until then, rape was rarely discussed or acknowledged: ‘Until the 1970s, most Americans assumed that rape, incest, and wife-beating rarely happened.’ The idea of rape culture was one result of these efforts.”

—Wikipedia, “Rape Culture”

I think I’d heard the phrase rape culture before reading this Wikipedia entry, but I’d never really contemplated its offensiveness. According to this entry, “rape culture is a concept that links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society…in which prevalent attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape.” While I can accept that, prior to the ’70s, people discounted the incidence rates of “rape, incest, and wife-beating,” I find the allegation that Americans as a social collective “excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape” or ever have to be facile and extremist.

I hear weekly if not daily from victims of second-wave feminist rhetoric and the influence it’s exercised over the past 30 years on social perceptions that translate to public policy. Today most Americans assume that the instrument born of 60s and 70s consciousness-raising efforts by equity feminists, the civil restraining order, is rarely abused. This falsehood is promulgated through the unconsciousness-raising efforts of radical feminist usurpers who’ve left proto-feminists like philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers asking, Who Stole Feminism?

Injustice, in the wake of the radical feminist movement, has merely performed an about-face.

Not un-ironically, more than one female respondent to this blog whose life has been trashed by false allegations legitimated through the medium of the restraining order has characterized her treatment by the state as “rape.”

Since it’s been projected that as many as 80% of the two to three million restraining orders issued each year by our courts, instruments that can completely dismantle their targets’ lives and are easily got by fraud, are based on frivolous or false allegations, users of the phrase rape culture—who have unquestionably contributed to the genesis of the “abuse industry”—should assess their own culpability in the manufacture of social injustice.

The Wikipedia entry I’ve cited explains rape culture includes behaviors like “victim-blaming” and “trivializing rape.” Considering that a significant proportion of restraining order abuses may be instances of victim-blaming, that is, of abusers’ (including violent abusers’) inducing the state to harass, humiliate, and drop the hammer on their victims; and considering that this abuse (characterized by some as “rape”) is arguably trivialized by its being categorically ignored or denied, a case arises for the reverse application of the phrase rape culture.

Acknowledging that restraining orders may be motivated by malice and do malice doesn’t somehow trivialize violence against women. I had occasion to talk with a victim of multiple rapes not long ago whose assailants were never held to account for their crimes. I certainly don’t discount either rape’s immediate trauma or the proximal trauma that results when its perpetrator gets off scot-free. Nor do I discount the claim by rape victims that perpetrators too often do walk even when victims are intrepid enough to report them, which may be only a small percentage of the time. Social justice, however, isn’t a zero-sum game played between men and women. Wrong is wrong, whoever its source or target. That’s what equity and equality denote. Since victims of restraining order abuse may be female, moreover, acknowledging the harms done by restraining orders does the opposite of trivializing violence against women. It’s denying that restraining orders are abused and abusive, rather, that trivializes violence against women.

It trivializes people and the value of their lives.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag restraining orders