Protection Orders Research Articles

Session on Firearm Violence to Stress Nonpartisanship

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessSession on Firearm Violence to Stress NonpartisanshipTerri D'ArrigoTerri D'ArrigoSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:26 Feb 2023https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2023.03.3.24AbstractUnderstanding the epidemiology of gun violence will equip psychiatrists for public health advocacy.In 2018, the National Rifle Association posted a tweet that began with “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.” Many in the medical community considered that to be a gauntlet thrown, and since then health professionals have demonstrated the myriad ways they have seen firearm violence harm and kill their patients. At APA’s 2023 Annual Meeting, a session titled “I Am in My Lane: A Public Health Approach to the Role of Health Care Providers in Firearm Violence” will offer strategies on how health professionals can convey the message that preventing firearm violence is a matter of public health, not politics or partisanship.Psychiatrists who wish to address firearms violence should focus on public health, says Aradhana Bela Sood, M.D., M.S.H.A.“Firearm violence is a polarizing topic, where any discussion of it is often equated with gun control,” session chair Aradhana Bela Sood, M.D., M.S.H.A., told Psychiatric News. She is a senior professor for child and mental health policy at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University. “As medical providers who deal with the aftermath of firearm-related morbidity and mortality, we would be well served to shift rhetoric that appears to infringe on individual rights to a focus on gun safety and preventive practices.”The session will cover the epidemiology of firearm violence and provide a historical perspective of the polarization surrounding the causality of firearm violence that will better enable attendees to frame the issue in terms of public health.Attendees will come away from the session with an understanding of regional firearm laws, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders (“red flag” laws) that allow family members or law enforcement to petition a judge to remove a firearm from the environment of a person considered to be at risk of harming themselves or others. The session will explore the challenges and barriers to implementing these laws and delve into how these laws have reduced morbidity and mortality from firearm violence, thus equipping attendees to be more effective as advocates for public health strategies to address the issue.Finally, attendees will learn how to get involved at the hospital, city, and state levels to advocate for policies and legislation that support safe firearm practices. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

A Culture of Consent: Legal Practitioners’ Experiences of Representing Women Who Have Been Misidentified as Predominant Aggressors on Family Violence Intervention Orders in Victoria, Australia

There is currently unprecedented attention in Australia on the misidentification of women victim-survivors as family violence ‘predominant aggressors’—this focus has largely been oriented towards the role of the police. Less research has considered court responses to misidentification and specifically, the role that legal practitioners play in recognising and responding to clients who have been misidentified. This article addresses this key gap in the literature through an exploration of 18 legal practitioners’ experiences of representing misidentified clients in the civil protection order system in the Australian state of Victoria. The findings suggest that legal practitioners face a number of challenges when representing clients who have been misidentified and that the magistrates’ courts are ill-equipped to respond to misidentification. As a consequence, a culture of respondents consenting to orders that should never have been made against them is maintained. This article calls for a greater focus on the role that the courts can play in providing a ‘safety net’ for victim-survivors who have been misidentified.

Restoration from out-of-home care for Aboriginal children: Evidence from the pathways of care longitudinal study and experiences of parents and children

BackgroundRestoration of Aboriginal children (also called reunification) is an under-researched area despite being the preferred permanency outcome for children. ObjectiveTo investigate the rate of restoration for Aboriginal children, the factors that influence restoration, and to explore the experiences of parents whose Aboriginal children have been restored, and their children. Participants and settingAnalyses were conducted using data from the NSW Department of Communities and Justice Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study (POCLS). MethodsThe quantitative sample includes all Aboriginal children in NSW who were on final Children’s Court care and protection orders by 30 April 2013. Qualitative data were extracted from the POCLS survey instruments. ResultsOf the 1018 Aboriginal children in the study, 15.2% were restored. Around 40 % of children entered care following just one (or no) substantiated Risk of Significant Harm reports. Children entering care under the age of 2 years were the least likely to be restored. Parents expressed dissatisfaction with child protection agencies and family support services both at the time their child was removed and in the restoration period. Parents and children expressed the importance of being supported to maintain family relationships while children are in care. ConclusionsDespite policy priorities to the contrary, few Aboriginal children are considered for restoration. More support is needed for Aboriginal parents interfacing with all stages of the care system and following restoration. Additional research is needed to understand the factors underlying decisions to remove Aboriginal children from their families and whether restoration to their family is considered or achieved.

A Critical Examination of the Influences of Intimate Partner Violence, Help-Seeking, and Social Identity on Women’s Experiences Seeking and Obtaining Civil Protection Orders

This research describes women’s engagement with the civil legal system as a safety strategy when experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). Using a critical lens, it explores how violence victimization, help-seeking, and social identities influence victim-survivors’ decisions to seek civil protection orders (POs) and whether they obtain them. Using cross-sectional survey methods, we recruited women experiencing IPV in relationships with men (N = 660) from ten emergency shelters in a metropolitan region of the southwestern United States. Violence and help-seeking predicted whether victim-survivors sought POs, whereas social identities predicted whether they received them, revealing the influence of social identities on civil justice outcomes.

RE: Impact on psychiatrists in intellectual disability of Court of Protection orders for section 49 (Mental Capacity Act) reports: online survey.

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Firearm Injury: An Escalating Health Crisis.

Firearm Injury: An Escalating Health Crisis.

Polarized Support for Intimate Partner Violence Gun-Related Interventions

Abstract Social movements pushed to reconceptualize intimate partner violence (IPV) as a social problem deserving of intervention rather than a private family matter. However, little work has examined which interventions the public is likely to support. How and where do personal politics affect perceptions of and responses to a social problem? To address these questions, 739 participants read a victim’s narrative from a court case and indicated their concern for the victim and support for issuing a protection order, prohibiting the abuser from owning a gun, or the victim owning a gun to protect herself. Concern for the victim and support for issuing a protection order was widespread, regardless of political leaning, with minor variations driven by role-taking and attitudes towards IPV. Similarly, support for the victim receiving a protection order was high, with political ideology and political affiliation having no direct effects. While concern increased support for each intervention, it held less explanatory power for gun-related interventions. Instead, political ideology and affiliation shaped support for disarming the abuser or arming the victim. Support for these interventions seemed to filter through a political lens. Thus, one’s personal politics drive divergent intervention attitudes, even when concern for a social problem is shared.

Chapitre 1. Présentation de la nouvelle loi en contexte

The 2021 bioethics law intends mainly to respond to expectations from society, mainly from minorities regarding procreation and little relayed by the “general states of bioethics”. It therefore looks bioethics, at the legislative level, not as a set of safeguards against the evolution of technologicals resources, but as the granting of new rights using these technologies. Beyond procreation, the law also loosens the constraints on the research and organ donation or genetic information. In so doing, it determines new balances between subjective rights and protective orders, which the Constitutional Council did not wish to examine.

Hit Where it Hurts: Healthcare Access and Intimate Partner Violence

We exploit a change in the public healthcare entitlement of undocumented migrants in Spain to investigate the causal link between withdrawal of healthcare and changes in help-seeking behaviour of women experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). We contribute to the new literature modelling domestic violence by taking a novel look at the role of human capital in decisions to seek help when in violent relationships. We use a difference-in-differences (DiD) methodology to compare the number of foreign applicants for protection orders before and after the reform using Spanish applicants as the counterfactual. The impact of the reform was immediate; foreign applicants decreased by 16% after the health policy reform was introduced and this drop amounts to 19% in areas with stronger enforcement of the reform. We perform several robustness checks including addressing potential bias from migration changes after the reform. Our findings are important for current policy discussions on granting/limiting access to public programs for the undocumented population. We provide evidence that restricted access to the healthcare system can have unintended negative consequences for the most vulnerable groups of the population with potentially important spill-over effects to the next generation.

Preventive Justice? Domestic Violence Protection Orders and their Intersections with Family and Other Laws and Legal Systems

Preventive Justice? Domestic Violence Protection Orders and their Intersections with Family and Other Laws and Legal Systems

The Impact of Extreme Risk Protection Orders on Homicide and Suicide: Are there Any Red Flags?

The Impact of Extreme Risk Protection Orders on Homicide and Suicide: Are there Any Red Flags?

Judicial Dilemmas of Female Domestic Violence Victims: An Empirical Study Based on Chinese Civil Judgments in 2020.

Women are the primary victims of domestic violence, but their experiences are often ignored in Chinese judicial judgments. Among 350 Chinese civil judgments on domestic violence in 2020, more than 96% involved female victims, and they faced various judicial dilemmas when seeking civil remedies. The court confirmed the existence of domestic violence in 26% of the cases, and 27% of applications for personal safety protection orders were rejected. More than two-thirds of female plaintiffs' divorce applications were not approved, and they received no compensation. This study analyzed the cause of these judicial dilemmas and proposed some solutions.

Firearm Mortality Among Pre-school Age Children, 2010-2020.

Firearms are a substantial cause of death for pre-school children (ages 0-5 years). The purpose of this study was to characterize fatal firearm violence in this age group. The Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were analyzed for the years 2010-2020. There were 1,220 firearm deaths during the study period with a 75% increase in the rate of deaths per 100,000 population. Most deaths (two-thirds) were among males. Non-Hispanic Blacks comprised 56.4% of all deaths in 2020, a 172% increase from 2010 and the rate for non-Hispanic Whites increased by 15.4% from 2010 to 2020. The majority of the deaths occurred in the South. Almost two-thirds (65.9%) of all firearm deaths were homicides, 30% were unintentional, and 4.1% were undetermined. Homicides were also the majority of deaths for non-Hispanic Blacks (64.9%), non-Hispanic Whites (60.8%), and Hispanics (81.3%). The years of potential life lost before 80 years of age were 94,105, with a plurality (43.3%) of losses occurring among non-Hispanic Black children. Sustained awareness campaigns should be implemented to make parents and guardians aware of the profound dangers of unlocked and loaded or unsafely stored firearms in the home. Child healthcare providers should counsel parents and guardians on firearm safety in households. Public health professionals should advocate for laws that can help protect children from firearm violence (e.g., Domestic Violence Restraining Orders, Child Access Prevention laws, and Extreme Risk Protection Order laws).

Farmers’ opinion about Syrian workers in agricultural sector in Turkey: Case study of Gaziantep

Due to the Syrian Civil War, many Syrians have had to flee their country and seek refuge in neighbouring countries, and they face a great deal of financial and social problems in their new countries of residence. Problems such as language barriers and hostility from the host community make it difficult for refugees to integrate into the countries which took them in, and the fact that they must become a part of the work force as a matter of priority to meet their daily needs means that they often work unskilled jobs for low wages and are not registered in any official systems. The structural properties of the agricultural sector means that it is one of the most popular work areas for Syrian migrants. This study aims to evaluate the circumstances of Syrian individuals under temporary protection status in Turkey in the agricultural sector from the perspective of farmers. To this end, a survey was conducted with 395 farmers working in the agricultural sector in the province of Gaziantep. According to the findings of the research, 61.5% of agricultural businesses in Gaziantep employ Syrian refugees. The main reason for farmers opting to employ Syrian workers under temporary protection order is low wages (78.8%). 82.9% of Syrian refugees work only during harvesting season. 92.4% work both harvesting and hoeing, while 79.2% of business owners state that employing refugees allows them to decreased their production costs. Despite the presence of legal regulations in Turkey outlining how refugees can become a part of the labour force, these haven’t prevented the prevalence of off-the-books employment. Making the necessary amendments to legal regulations regarding seasonal workers in the agricultural sector would benefit both local workers and Syrian refugees. Additionally, legislation regarding salaries would improve the living standards of refugee workers and increase their motivation to work, thus improve productivity in agricultural products.

Firearm-Related Injuries and Deaths in Children and Youth.

Firearms are the leading cause of death in children and youth 0 to 24 years of age in the United States. In 2020, firearms resulted in 10,197 deaths (fatality rate 9.91/100,000 youth 0-24 years old). Firearms are the leading mechanism of death in pediatric suicides and homicides. Increased access to firearms is associated with increased rates of firearm deaths. Substantial disparities in firearm injuries and deaths exist by age, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and gender identity and for deaths related to legal intervention. Barriers to firearm access can decrease the risk to youth for firearm suicide, homicide, or unintentional shooting injury and death. Given the high lethality of firearms and the impulsivity associated with suicidal ideation, removing firearms from the home or securely storing them-referred to as lethal means restriction of firearms-is critical, especially for youth at risk for suicide. Primary care-, emergency department-, mental health-, hospital-, and community-based intervention programs can effectively screen and intervene for individuals at risk for harming themselves or others. The delivery of anticipatory guidance coupled with safety equipment provision improves firearm safer storage. Strong state-level firearm legislation is associated with decreased rates of firearm injuries and death. This includes legislation focused on comprehensive firearm licensing strategies and extreme risk protection order laws. A firm commitment to confront this public health crisis with a multipronged approach engaging all stakeholders, including individuals, families, clinicians, health systems, communities, public health advocates, firearm owners and nonowners, and policy makers, is essential to address the worsening firearm crisis facing US youth today.

Constitutionalizing care: How can we expand our constitutional imaginary after Covid-19?

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has no doubt caused serious disruptions to lives across the globe. These range from minor inconveniences to major consequences to personal, social, political, economic, and constitutional aspects. With the pandemic still present but its biggest effects waning, this framing article for our symposium on Covid-19 seeks to address the question of whether constitutional law should be rethought, recalibrated to create a more resilient, more egalitarian, and more protective constitutional order. It offers a series of provocations centered around the idea of care as a constitutionalist ideal by which to organize a refreshed post-Covid constitutional order. By care, I mean that which is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and safety of persons. The constitutionalization of care could mean a further reorientation of our constitutional focus from the usual “hard” subjects of constitutionalism, i.e. emergency power, pandemic regulation, and the continued working of the legislature, towards what may, so far, have been marginalized as “soft” constitutional subjects like social relations and families. These, I argue, are critical as Covid-19 has shown us that it is these “soft” constitutional subjects that have had the widest and deepest impact on the ground. This article therefore seeks to reconsider our constitutional epistemology.

Orders of Protection

The feminist adage “the personal is political” is not ahistorical. It is being operationalized in a time when the relationship between the private and the public is undergoing historic transformation. Making privatized violence public under current conditions often involves channeling the most authoritarian tendencies of the state into relationships made increasingly desperate by the conditions of contemporary capitalism. The ethnographic focus of the essay is the work of a feminist organization operating in the context of Lavender Hill in Cape Town, a neighborhood created by apartheid forced removals and made more precarious by post-apartheid abandonment. The essay focuses on an explosion in the use of protection orders to compel police to intervene in the intimate relationships of households and neighbors, and offers an extended explanation of how and why feminism provides an exemplary case of reactionary politics for our times. The essay ends with a plea to draw on a different trajectory of feminism as a way of reconstituting a transformative political agenda, one that must take the historical transformations of racial capitalism seriously.

Extreme risk protection orders in response to threats of multiple victim/mass shooting in six U.S. states: A descriptive study

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as red flag laws, are a potential tool to prevent firearm violence, including mass shootings, but little is currently known about the extent of their use in cases of mass shooting threats or about the threats themselves. We collected and abstracted information from ERPO cases from six states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, and Washington). Ten percent (N = 662) of all ERPO cases (N = 6787) were in response to a threat of killing at least 3 people. Using these cases, we created a typology of multiple victim/mass shooting threats, the most common of which was the maximum casualty threat. The most common target for a multiple victim/mass shooting threat was a K-12 school, followed by businesses, then intimate partners and their children and families. Judges granted 93% of petitions that involved these threats at the temporary ERPO stage and, of those cases in which a final hearing was held, judges granted 84% of final ERPOs. While we cannot know how many of the 662 ERPO cases precipitated by a threat would have resulted in a multiple victim/mass shooting event had ERPO laws not been used to prohibit the purchase and possession of firearms, the study provides evidence at least that ERPOs are being used in six states in a substantial number of these kinds of cases that could have ended in tragedy.

Police and Duty Lawyer Perceptions of Domestic Violence Protection Order Proceedings Involving Parents: Towards Greater System Accountability and Family-Centred Decision-Making

PurposeDomestic violence (DV) is a problem of global significance and remains a gendered issue that disproportionately affects women and children. Prevalence studies on women’s experiences of DV suggest that around 50% of victims identify as mothers. The effects of DV on mothers and children are well documented, raising implications for their protection. Civil protection orders are a legal tool used to reduce and prevent experiences of DV. Research on protection order effectiveness is mixed with research suggesting that the ongoing relationship between a respondent and aggrieved parent around child contact presents ongoing opportunities for re-victimization. This study contributes to the scant literature on the implications of protection orders on parental responsibilities.MethodThe study draws on surveys with duty lawyers and focus groups with police officers. A thematic analysis was used to examine perceptions and experiences of ‘no contact’ protection orders and respondent parent non-compliance where mutual children are involved.ResultsFindings suggest that ambiguous ‘no contact’ conditions and a lack of clarity around their implications for child contact play a key role in respondent parent non-compliance, ranging from uninformed non-compliance to the strategic use of children as a form of coercive control in non-compliance.ConclusionFindings raise implications for specialist legal advice and support for parents affected by DV to sit alongside protection order court proceedings. Findings highlight the need for greater system accountability to ensure court-issued protection orders take a family-centred approach that align with parental responsibilities and ensure child and adult victims’ safety and wellbeing.

Longitudinal reflections on the slow and fast crisis of domestic violence during COVID‐19

AbstractThis paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. In this case, the modernisation of a court system that for too‐long served as an obstacle to survivors' legal protection and facilitated abusers' ability to engage in slow violence during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings. This paper thus highlights the ‘temporal affordances’ of longitudinal research that enable analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system.