Is There a Protection Order to Prison Pipeline? Gendered Dimensions of Cross-Petitions

ABSTRACT

There is extensive debate about whether criminal justice responses are appropriate or effective in helping domestic violence (DV) victim/survivors achieve safety. Supporters argue that criminalization best protects victim/survivors; others have expressed serious concerns about the unintended consequences of criminalization. Victim/survivors (especially women of color) are routinely made more vulnerable by the legal resources designed to help them. They are often arrested with or instead of their abuser, prosecuted for DV as “victim-defendants,” and reported to governmental agencies such as child protection services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even the protection order system may not provide safety, especially when abusers are able to obtain protection orders against victim/survivors. We examine one facet of the “abuse-to-prison” pipeline – cross-filings for protection orders. We analyze 313 cross-filings for protection orders, comparing them to 1,004 single-filings. We find that cross-filings are a gendered phenomenon, with men more likely to be involved in cross-filings than women, and men less likely than women to report the types of abuse that qualifies for an order. Cross-filings may be an example of abusers leveraging the legal system to extend control over victim/survivors, rendering victim/survivors ineligible for resources and making them vulnerable to arrest and other forms of state control.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner violence
• domestic violence
• domestic abuse
• legal abuse
• gender
• social policy
• criminalization
• victim-defendants

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank many of the graduate and undergraduate students who helped with the data collection and coding for this project, including John Costello, Mikaela Wallin, Kellie Herson, Jamie Watson, Vanessa Martinez-Morales, Victoria Namuggala, Meghan Lee, Taylor Thompson, Trisha Dasgupta, Katie Knoepker, Natasha McLain, Anna Vaszar, Maria Hodge, Madeline Snarr, Shelby Baker, and Victoria Silva.

Disclosure statement

Authors Alesha Durfee and Leigh Goodmark declare that they have no conflicts to report.

Ethical Standards and Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation at Arizona State University and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. No informed consent was required by Arizona State University since these are anonymized, and often public, court records.

Notes

¹ All names are pseudonyms in order to maintain the confidentiality of the petitioners and respondents.

² The relevant provision of the Violence Against Women Act is codified at 18 U.S. C. 2265(c).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Justice [2015-IJ-CX-0013]; Institute of Social Science Research, Arizona State University.