The Impact of Place on Domestic Violence Protective Orders
Commentary by Cassie Chambers Armstrong
Cassie Chambers Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law and also serves in the Kentucky State Senate. Her teaching and research interests include rural court systems, access to justice, and poverty law. She is the author of Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains (Ballantine Books, 2020).
Like all Commentary here on the Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
I began my career as a legal aid attorney representing low-income survivors of violence in rural Kentucky. I had expected the job to be hard, and it was. But it was often hard for unexpected reasons. The courts I practiced in were far apart, and I spent hours in my car driving between them. There were few attorneys in the small towns where I worked, and most city lawyers weren’t interested in pro bono cases “out in the state.” The clients I represented needed lots of things–transportation, healthcare, educational opportunities—and the organizations providing these resources were hours away.
At the end of the day, when I was back in the legal aid office talking to my colleagues who practiced in urban courts, I was struck by how different our days had been. They had helped dozens of people at the court’s weekly domestic violence docket. I had spent half the workday driving to help just one. They had met with community partners, staffed legal assistance tables, and collaborated with other organizations. It was unusual for me to see another service provider in court. They were often grateful if the court pushed their hearing off a week because it gave them more time to prepare their case and their client. I dreaded case delays because I worried repeating the long drive to and from court would lead my client to drop her case.
This experience led me to try to understand the impact of place on domestic violence protective orders. Specifically, I am interested in the unique challenges that rural courts face and how these barriers impact those trying to navigate these legal processes. Protective orders are especially important to understand because they are the most utilized legal proceeding to address domestic violence.
Prior studies have found important place-based differences in protective order processes. Previous research concluded that women living in rural areas disproportionately struggle to get and enforce an order, and that rural judges are more likely to make decisions based on extralegal factors. Other studies have documented that rural women are, on average, three times further away from domestic violence resources, and that programs in rural communities served a greater area with fewer shelter beds. Research has also shown that rural areas have fewer judicial resources to devote to domestic violence, in part because other crimes are perceived as a higher priority.
I sought to add to this body of research with two studies, examining two different parts of the domestic violence protective order system. For the first study, published in the University of Kentucky Journal of Law, I partnered with ZeroV, Kentucky’s leading non-profit addressing domestic violence, to create a snapshot of domestic violence proceedings. ZeroV has advocates in every Kentucky courtroom to assist survivors of violence, and I worked with these advocates to develop and complete a survey to document things like the number of cases in court, the representation status of the parties, and various legal outcomes. Advocates completed this survey for one docket, giving us a glimpse into how urban and rural courts were handling these matters at one moment in time. Together, we were able to collect data on over 1,000 cases from 101 courtrooms across 76 counties.
The data showed novel and important place-based differences. Domestic violence survivors navigating rural court systems are less likely to be represented by counsel, and courts are less likely to provide them with information about supportive resources—such as domestic violence advocacy programs. They are less likely to have access to a dedicated family court judge (instead of a court of general jurisdiction) and unlikely to have a judge enter ancillary orders to address issues of child custody or child support—even though the court has the statutory authority to address these issues. Those living in rural areas are less likely to have meaningful access to virtual court options that might give them flexibility and an increased sense of safety. Rural survivors are more likely to have a court hear their petition in open court, in front of strangers, instead of a closed proceeding.
For my second study, I reviewed docket sheets from 1,000 Kentucky courts and coded these records for details like: length of the case, time to the first court hearing, overall number of hearings, legal representation, estimated travel time for the petitioner, and overall case disposition. From this, I was able to conclude that there are important urban-rural differences in many of these variables. Specifically, petitioners in urban areas experience longer cases with more court hearings; this is, in turn, associated with a greater likelihood of obtaining an order of protection. This finding suggests that those in urban areas receive more legal process, and that this legal process is associated with a greater chance of success. In contrast, petitioners in rural areas are further from resources and are more likely to voluntarily dismiss their case—perhaps suggesting a link between distance from resources and access to justice.
Interestingly, this study also found that rural petitioners are more likely to have a court dismiss their case before they have had a single hearing. This means that judges are determining, based on the pleadings alone, that a person is not entitled to relief. If a rural petitioner does obtain a protective order, it is likely to be for a much shorter period of time: whereas the average rural protective order lasted for 687.28 days, the average urban protective order lasted 855.34 days. Furthermore, only 22% of the protective orders in urban courts were for less than six months, compared to 41% of protective orders entered by rural courts.
Taken together, these studies give us some insight into protective order court processes. They paint a picture of a system that is crucial to many survivors of violence, regardless of their location, and shed light on the unique barriers those in rural areas face. These challenges are often overlooked, and it is my hope that this research begins to focus attention and resources on some of these underserved areas.
For more of this author’s work in the Review, see her commentary on rural eviction trends and their impact on rural communities.
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