Theme 1 sets the stage. It acquaints the reader with the women’s demoralizing reality before each pursued her civil protection order. This is a lived experience that they all shared. It is presented first to put the women’s views about the effectiveness of civil protection orders into proper perspective.
This section presents evidence that each of the 10 women shared the same unnerving lived experience before obtaining her order: She was kept off-balance by her former male partner’s merciless unpredictability. He trailed her when she was driving. He prowled past her house in his car. He parked down the street from her house and sat watching from his car for hours. He lurked on her property. He pounded on her doors or broke into her home at all hours, wreaking havoc. He badgered her with calls from different phone numbers. He goaded her with phone texts. He made indirect and direct threats. He made predictable life impossible. P10 pointed out that because a stalker “would come and go as he wanted, a stalked woman can’t even live a normal life from looking over our shoulders and wondering if that person is going to come back at any time.” The former male partner riddled each woman’s life with the unknown. He taunted her. She felt hunted.
The women’s perspectives of this period reflected the unremitting wariness and fear of prey. P7’s life was
an everyday struggle. I didn’t know what type of mood he was going to be in. I was always afraid to say anything, do certain things because I didn’t want to trigger whatever it was that made him upset. Every day was unpredictable. I was always tense.
P9 “was always scared and I had to watch my back” because her former male partner made her life “crazy, hectic.” P8 said, “I lived constantly in fear, always looking behind, under the car, always locking up behind me, leaving lights on at night. Trying to look around me. Just be aware. I was very nervous and very—it was very tiring.”
Similarly, P10 described her unpredictable life as “very stressful. I was always worried that something was going to happen.” P6 described her unpredictability:
...brutal, physically and emotionally. Not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next. What’s going to happen. Just scary, I guess. Yeah, I mean you didn’t know at what point he was going to show up at your house, or what he was going to do, or anything that was going to happen. {He might} just show up every hour of the night, to do things and contact you.
P4 “lived in fear the whole time that he would come and hurt me again.” Before she obtained her civil protection order, P1’s former male partner hounded her with a steady stream of menacing events. “He would stalk me and constantly drive by my house and constantly give me threats.”
Three women used the word terror. P5 reported that, “My son saw him hiding in the woods outside of the house. His hiding and stalking was terrorizing me.” P2
described her life before she obtained her civil protection order:
Terrifying. Driving home, I’d go home and he’d be in my carport hiding out where he had crawled through thorn thickets to get to my house. Tried to break into my house. He would sit down the road to watch me. I was just completely terrified to be alone or be home. Couldn’t sleep. He would threaten me via phone, text message; numerous, numerous text messages. Come to my house, beat on my door, threaten me. Outside my house standing on my porch. He had physically assaulted me like four times and I ended up in the hospital once. It had been going on over a two-year span.
Terror. I guess that’s the best way to put it. I was helpless. I felt like I couldn’t do anything to protect myself. Because he was such a good manipulator, he could talk me into just about anything up until the point where he tried to kill me while I was pregnant.
Speaking of death threats, maltreatment did not even stop at terror. Six of the women felt that their own death was a real possibility at the hands of their abusive former male partner. P8 said, “He’d come and tell me he’s going to kill me.” Had she not obtained the civil protection order, P5 predicted that, “I’d still be in hell or dead. Probably dead.” P4 reported, “He would have probably killed me.” P2 articulated, “He probably would have killed me, absolutely.” P1 said, “He could have come to my home and killed me, killed our son.” P3 said her former male partner tried to kill her when she was pregnant; his attempt on her life was unsuccessful but it sent her into premature labor. The looming threat of death eclipses even the most unnerving premeditated taunting and stalking.
The question arises as to why the women endured such treatment for long periods rather than petitioning for a civil protection order early in the abuse or leaving him altogether. One answer is that an abused woman endures a struggle between her mind and her heart before admitting that she is being abused and has reached the point that she needs legal protection from the man who says he loves her. P2 provided the barest glimpse of this struggle when she said her challenge was “just coming up with the nerve to go get [my order against him]… realizing that it actually was a stalking issue that needed to be addressed by law enforcement to keep him away from me.” P7 knew that she could get a protection order after the abuse became physical rather than just verbal.
“But I was still scared to, or it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to, simply because he was from the area. I wasn’t from the area.” P1 admitted that she was aware that civil protection orders existed but equivocated because “I felt that my situation wasn’t taken as serious as what it should have been.”
The women found out about civil protection orders primarily from policemen. Table 1 shows that eight out of the 10 women learned about civil protection orders from police officers who answered their 911 calls. As an example, P3 learned about civil protection through the officers who responded to her 911 call to take her to the hospital for premature labor brought on by her husband’s attack:
Before that incident, I didn’t even have an idea that they issued such orders. When the officers were getting me into the ambulance, interviewing me on what happened, and asking me to show them what happened, they took pictures of my face because I did have marks all over. And they told me that if I didn’t want him around that they could help me because the state could take over the case and they could issue an order of protection based on the evidence, because of the facial markings.
P10 said that the 911 operator gave her the option of “letting it go or putting in an order for protection if she felt threatened,” and the police who followed up on her call told her specifically about civil protection orders. P2 also knew about civil protection orders because she had worked in law enforcement and had obtained an order on a previous male partner. The other two women learned about civil protection from friends or family (see Table 1). When P7 called 911 against her former male partner, she described how the police answered the call:
[they] didn’t inform me about it. They basically said just to break up with him, don’t go round him, which was kind of difficult. But a friend told me to get the protection order. That was when [my former male partner] attempted to hit me with his car.
P8’s mother told her about civil protection orders. Table 1
Source of Initial Information About Civil Protection Orders
Participant Police Family/Friends
P1 X P2 X P3 X P4 X P5 X P6 X P7 X P8 X P9 X P10 X