Helping Victims Become Survivors 7
April 10th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I work as a full-time volunteer at a domestic violence center and shelter.
One of the many tasks that I do for that organization is to work as a legal advocate at the county courthouse, helping people file for an injunction for protection (some states call it an Order For Protection).
Yesterday afternoon, as usual, one of the county clerks peered out of the glass peek-hole in the locked, unmarked door, then opened the door, greeted me and let me into the injunction room. A middle-aged woman was already sitting in one of the carrels, looking over the stack of forms that are required to ask the court to issue a domestic violence injunction against her abuser.
I approached her, squatted to match her eye level, quietly told her my first name, and assured her that that I was there to help her and to answer any questions that she might have.
Thus began another shift of working as a volunteer legal advocate.
If you’re like most people, you’re probably wondering why the county clerks don’t help people and answer their questions.
Well, the fact is, the county clerks do answer some questions and offer some help, but they’re only allowed to answer questions having to do with the paperwork itself — for example, “Do I need to use my middle name on this form?” They haven’t been trained to work with victims of domestic violence and they’re certainly way too busy processing everyone’s paperwork to spend any time with individual victims.
So I have a really good relationship with all of the clerks.
While talking with that first woman about what her abuser had done to her, I explained a few things that I gave her to take home: a brochure that describes the many free services that our domestic violence center provides to victims, a drawing of The Cycle of Violence, a safety plan that gives her ideas for how to protect herself in any future DV events, a page of advice for how to behave in court, and a list of “warning signs” to be aware of in any relationship.
I also strongly recommended that she attend our free support groups for DV victims.
It took over an hour to help that first woman. The most time-consuming part is writing the narrative — the story of why the petitioner needs the court’s protection from the respondent.
In that case, the woman told me her story and then wrote her own narrative, with me giving her advice as she wrote. I’ve filled out a lot of injunctions and spent a lot of time in the courtroom, so I have a good idea of what information the judges need to know to be able to make their decision.
In other cases, I’ve written the petitioner’s narrative for them, either because they were physically unable to write it themselves, or because their penmanship, spelling or communication skills were so bad that their own attempt at writing their narrative was unintelligible.
When we finished, the clerk looked at the woman’s drivers license, swore her in, and notarized her signature on each of the injunction forms. Then the clerk gave her a slip of paper with her case number on it, and a phone number to call later in the day, to find out if her injunction had been granted. The woman thanked me for all of my help and left.
A few minutes later, the clerk got a phone call. After she hung up, she turned to me and said “Uh-oh!” She then told me that a man had filed for an injunction the day before, but it had been denied. So he had come back again that morning and re-filed it. And the judge had denied it a second time.
The phone call had been from one of the clerks out at the public counter, calling to say that he was back for a third try. And he was mad.
He was a thin man in his sixties. As he told me his story, it was obvious to me that he had plenty of reasons to ask the court for an injunction against his abuser. But when I looked over his two previous petitions that had been denied, I could see that he didn’t have the ability to communicate his reasons on paper for the judge.
So I interviewed him and wrote all of his paperwork for him, while reading each sentence and each paragraph back to him, over and over, to make sure that what I was writing was what he wanted the judge to know.
It took 90 minutes to finish his third attempt at getting an injunction against his abuser. He thanked me, and told the clerk that he would come back later, to see if it had been granted or not.
In the meantime, a very young woman sat at the other end of the room. She had come in about 30 minutes before I had finished helping the older man, and had filled out all of the non-narrative parts of her paperwork.
But she had watched me helping the man, and she wanted me to write her narrative for her. She was asking for a DV injunction for herself and on behalf of her baby, against her abuser, who had been jailed for beating her in the past, and was currently threatening to kill her.
I didn’t finish writing her narrative until 40 minutes after the clerk’s office had closed its doors to new clients for the day. The judge on duty called the injunction room twice, to see if we were done yet. He’s not allowed to go home until he has ruled on every petition for an injunction that has been filled out each day.
The young woman had to leave to get to work as soon as her paperwork was finished, but I stayed and waited for the clerk to type it up and take it upstairs to the judge.
Then I waited for the clerk to return, to tell me what the judge had decided.
Ten minutes later, the clerk returned. That first middle-aged woman’s injunction had been granted. The older man’s third attempt at getting an injunction had been granted. The young woman with the baby’s injunction had been granted.
Three for three. A perfect day.
As I walked down the hallway to the escalators to leave, I met the older man, who was coming back to find out the results of his third try. I told him that his injunction had been granted, so his abuser was going to have to stay away from him. He stared at me for a second in disbelief. Then he eagerly shook my hand for several seconds. Tears filled his eyes, and through his sobs, he asked, “Does this mean it’s safe to go home?”
Of course, a piece of paper from the court can’t make anyone safe. But I knew what he meant — the law was finally going to be on his side.
As I rode down the escalator, he waved at me from the hallway outside of the injunction room. I waved back.
A perfect day.
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Domestic Violence, Inspirational, Personal, Survivors