“For those who don’t know, rape culture is an environment in which rape is highly prevalent, normalized and excused by the society’s media, popular culture, and political figures.” —Ashley Jordan, The Humanist Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com *Omitted from this collage, its author realizes belatedly, is the acronym VAWA, which stands for a vector of evil. […]
April 16, 2018
This post addresses a block its writer has noted even in the commentaries of those profoundly injured by unjust or false accusations. That block typically runs something like this: “I’m totally for restraining orders when they protect the violently abused, but….” This perspective is blind, and this post will explain why. “The road to hell […]
April 12, 2018
The angry speech of people who’ve been falsely accused in one or another legal procedure and labeled freakish, scary, or violent is often highlighted to imply that because they use “bad words,” they must be bad people whose claims of injustice aren’t worthy of consideration. Such people have been wrongly deprived of some or all of the […]
May 14, 2016
“It was late summer when we met, on a patio jutting out onto the Pacific. The night was still warm as I sipped my Gewürztraminer and asked him about his exciting career. His articulate responses drew me in, and I breathed back nerves and adrenaline with the ocean air as we continued this perfect first […]
November 28, 2015
“Learned helplessness is behavior typical of an organism (human or animal) that has endured repeated painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it was unable to escape or avoid. After such experience, the organism often fails to learn escape or avoidance in new situations where such behavior would be effective. In other words, the organism seems […]
October 13, 2015
Traffickers of this blog will sometimes advise that complainants of abuse of so-called “protective orders” consider “the bigger picture.” They feel the matter is less about personal loss than about statutory and procedural derelictions (bad law and judicial bias, carelessness, and tyranny). They emphasize principle over individual privation. For some, the bigger picture that’s stressed […]
October 1, 2015
A recent commenter observed that the “abuse industry” is a goldmine that no one who benefits from it has any motive to oppose, including judges and lawyers. There are exceptions—attorneys Gregory Hession and David Heleniak are examples—but in general the commenter is right. Civil rights groups like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center […]
September 23, 2015
Misperception of the significance of false accusations is a topic that’s been considered in past posts on this blog, particularly false accusations of sexual assault, which are the only false accusations anyone seems to believe are deserving of mention. It’s wrong to say that the nature of false accusations doesn’t matter. But more relevant to […]
August 27, 2015
Below is a proposition by a 74-year-old California woman, Anne Copeland, who’s earning a degree in criminal justice administration. Anne alleges that accusations against her made in a restraining order petition were trumped up, and has reported being taunted and terrorized by her accusers, who were her neighbors. She also reports she’s been prohibited from performing volunteer […]
August 15, 2015
“In thousands of 10-minute hearings held all over the Commonwealth, judges are now able to do what the Marxists have only dreamed of doing before now, and could never hope to do before they were able to use the pretext of ‘domestic violence.’ However, the real violence is almost always to the rights of the […]
August 12, 2015
One of the earliest posts on this blog (from 2011) offers some procedural orientation to the falsely accused. The author hasn’t revisited the post except to update a link to attorney Gregory Hession’s blog, MassOutrage, which is recommended reading. Much of the author’s early advice is important: show up early, dress well, be polite, organize […]
July 9, 2015
Both questions in the title have a common answer, which I’ll illustrate by allegory. When I was about 20, I worked next to the residence of an aged woman who kept a Rottweiler on a chain in her yard. The dog lived on the tie-out all hours of the day and probably had all of […]
June 26, 2015
“I hate this world and almost everybody in it. People use each other. I find most of you disgusting. My brothers are disgusting. The people I used to work with are disgusting. You’re shallow, you’re two-faced and hypocritical, you’re judgmental, you cause me more pain than you could ever possibly know. You don’t want me […]
June 23, 2015
The author of this guest commentary is a Virginia man whose wife obtained “three temporary restraining orders against [him], and finally got a permanent restraining order imposed against [him] in Colorado in January 2015, based on a claim of domestic abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and physical assault,” a claim made seven months after she had […]
June 22, 2015
According to a critic of the last post, restraining order abuse is apolitical, and he rejects the writer for not striving “to build a broad, non-ideological [base?] for real restraining order reform.” This is not—or it shouldn’t be—an ideological issue. It’s an issue that affects liberals and conservatives alike, and a problem in liberal and […]
May 19, 2015
I started to include the contents of this post in the last one, “Why More Falsely Accused Don’t Speak Out.” Then I thought the topic of angry white men might be due some room of its own. The previous post outlined reasons why men and women who’ve been victimized by false accusations and procedural abuse are subdued from voicing their […]
April 6, 2015
This is the first post on this blog to introduce Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition proposed by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer, whose books on the subject of posttraumatic stress stemming from court-mediated violations are Overcoming the Devastation of Legal Abuse Syndrome (1995) and Legal Abuse Syndrome: 8 Steps for Avoiding the […]
May 17, 2018
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