When Civil Protection Orders Don't Work

The Columbus Dispatch has a piece on a local woman who survived an attack by her estranged husband. She played dead. He killed himself.

She had a civil protection order. He ignored it. The story takes some time talking about how these orders often don't work.

"It sort of cuts both ways," said Phyllis Carlson-Riehm, executive director of the Action Ohio Coalition for Battered Women. A protection order gives credence to a victim's complaints and provides evidence that she's serious about ending the abuse, she said.

"Usually, we encourage people to take that step, but we realize it can cause more violence. … A protective order is a piece of paper, and a bullet can go through it and a knife can slash it."

In a paper published last year, Judy Postmus of Rutgers University evaluated the research on protection orders and the negative assumptions surrounding them, including the belief that they aren't useful. Postmus, a social-work professor and director of the Center for Violence Against Women and Children, concluded that if the abuse is severe and long-lasting, a protection order might be ineffective and cause more problems for the victim.

We've seen that just this week with two horrible incidents here in Ohio. In the first, in Canal Winchester, a woman who had been granted a civil protective order, was shot and killed through the car windshield when he blocked her way on a public road. The second incident, in Portsmouth, did not involved such an order, to my knowledge. A man who had been served with divorce papers walked into his wife's school, fired a gun, then stabbed his teacher wife. She is in critical condition.

Most disturbing in this Dispatch story, is that nowhere is there ANY advice for how people can protect THEMSELVES when they apply for their civil protection order. The story is just about how the orders frequently don't work, but do give the courts and law enforcement a little bit of a tool to use if things take a turn for the worse.

Unfortunately, when things take such a turn, its often a deadly turn for the person being stalked or harrassed.