Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Life of restraint
I have a restraining order on my ex. But he has a grip on my life.
By Spike Gillespie
[10/25/99]

Martha rules!
The world is her oyster stuffed with cilantro-garlic pesto.
By Jonathan Poletti
[10/22/99]

Freudian fear and cooked statistics
The recent media alert about sex-crazed "tweens" is mostly a lot of hoo-ha with naught behind it.
By Karen Houppert
[10/22/99]

Teen girls not in a rush
Four random but not randy "tween" girls talk about boobs, boys and sex -- and why they're not in a hurry to have any of it.
By Karen Houppert
[10/22/99]

Love me, love my guns
A shotgun tumbled from a closet and my husband drifted from my heart.
By Susan Straight
[10/21/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The notion of women falsely crying abuse is anathema to domestic violence activists; for many feminists, talk about spiteful, manipulative ex-wives sets off a misogyny alarm. Yet to recognize that such acts are possible, one need not see women as uniquely vindictive or devious, only as human. The advantages of a restraining order to the complainant -- exclusive possession of the home (with the alleged abuser often required to continue paying the rent or mortgage), temporary and probably permanent sole custody of the children -- can be tempting. So can, let's face it, the opportunity to make your ex very miserable.

Also Today Life of restraint I have a restraining order on my ex. But he has a grip on my life. By Spike Gillespie

Indeed, while fathers' rights activists undoubtedly have a point when they say that men claiming to be victims of domestic abuse are generally viewed with far more skepticism, it's certainly not just women who have taken advantage of the system.

One of the witnesses testifying at the recent legislative hearing in Massachusetts was Myra Dunne, a nurse who was thrown out of her house on her husband's complaint during divorce proceedings. One New Jersey woman was hit with a restraining order because she vocally disapproved of her estranged husband's cohabitation with a girlfriend. She violated the order by berating him during a visitation exchange for bringing "that slut" to a birthday party for one of the children, and was sentenced to six months probation and community service.

Those who pooh-pooh claims of widespread restraining-order abuse are fond of citing an analysis of public records in Massachusetts showing that 54 percent of men named in domestic restraining orders in 1992-93 had a history of drug or alcohol offenses, 48 percent had been charged with a violent crime (though not necessarily convicted) and one in four had been in jail or on probation before the order was granted.

Yet these numbers hardly refute claims that the targets are frequently non-abusive men. It is entirely possible for most of the defendants to be a bad lot and for a sizable minority to be wrongly accused.

Friend believes that 40 to 50 percent of restraining orders are strategic ploys. This rather inflammatory estimate is echoed by Dorothy Wright, a New Jersey lawyer and a former board member of a battered women's shelter. Supporters of the law insist that at most 4 or 5 percent may be obtained under false pretenses. But even that adds up to more than 1,500 a year in Massachusetts alone. That's hardly a trifle when it's a question of people being kicked out of their homes, cut off from their children, sometimes jailed and effectively branded as criminals without the safeguards of a criminal trial.

Public officials typically brush off concerns about the misuse of restraining orders by saying that protecting women must be the top priority. "Given the number of women killed in domestic abuse cases, we have a crisis on our hands,'' Jean Haertl, executive director of the Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence, told the Boston Herald recently.

The specter of mortal danger hovers over the debate on restraining orders, often making rational discussion impossible. It's hard not to seem callous if you question whether an average of 20 women slain annually by husbands, ex-husbands and boyfriends in Massachusetts, which has a population of over 6 million, amounts to an emergency that warrants the suspension of civil rights (any more than the nearly 200 non-domestic homicides that take place in the state every year).

"How you balance [due process] with a real victim's need for protection is a tough issue," says Friend, whose clientele has included abused women and men as well as disenfranchised parents. Even when there has been no physical violence and there are no overt threats, she says, a woman's fear can be based on real but subtle danger signals. Or it can be a paranoid response to media sensationalism that makes it look like slaughtering the wife and the kids is a fairly typical male response to divorce. Or it can be a convenient "abuse excuse." Without mind-reading, it is often impossible for the courts to make those distinctions. But the "better safe than sorry" approach can turn into something disturbingly akin to presumption of guilt.

The tension between preventing future harm to victims and protecting the rights of the accused is a notoriously thorny problem. Some of the same dilemmas are posed by recent measures against sex offenders who have completed their sentence -- though they, at least, have been actually convicted of a crime.

But do the tough restraining-order policies help victims? A man who is ready to kill a woman and either take his own life or face a murder rap surely won't be deterred by a charge of violating a court order. Virtually all the research -- and, most recently, two studies included in the 1996 book "Do Arrests and Restraining Orders Work?" edited by University of Massachusetts-Lowell criminologists Carl and Eve Buzawa -- concludes that the orders have little if any protective effect, except perhaps for women who were not severely victimized in the first place. If so, peddling these orders to people in real danger is like giving cancer patients a drug that cures the common cold.

University of Rhode Island sociologist Richard Gelles, a leading authority on domestic violence, also cautions that the more the legal system is bogged down in trivial pursuits, the less likely it is to single out the serious cases that do require urgent intervention.

Nor is there any evidence that an effort to curb frivolous restraining orders will endanger lives. When the courts in New Jersey began to issue fewer restraining orders as a result of appellate rulings that tightened the definition of domestic violence (excluding verbal abuse without persistent harassment or threats), an outcry from battered women's advocates was quick to follow -- but a rise in the domestic homicide rate was not.

Nevertheless, at least for now, efforts to reform restraining-order legislation in ways that would provide more protection for defendants are given little chance to succeed. Perhaps because the war on domestic violence is a more politically correct cause than the war on crime, the plight of people abused by restraining orders has not attracted the sympathy one can usually expect for casualties of prosecutorial and judicial zeal. The American Civil Liberties Union has stayed mum on the subject. Until recently, the media has ignored it as well, and remains uneasy with it. The issue largely continues to be seen (despite a growing number of women on the receiving end of restraining orders) in terms of men trying to snatch back the power newly gained by women.

Perhaps, for this attitude to change, we would have to start seeing women and men as truly equal. Then we would recognize that women, no less than men, are capable of abusing the power they're given, and that the protection of women does not justify the surrender of civil rights any more than the protection of men.

Then we might even recognize that the sympathy due a woman who lives in fear of her abusive ex-husband should also be extended to the father who can be hauled off to jail if he makes a phone call to wish his daughter a happy birthday.
salon.com | Oct. 25, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon