Faith in protection orders wanes

Women's groups say they are losing faith in the justice system after a one-third drop in protection orders against violent men in the past five years.

Protection orders granted in Family Courts have dropped steadily, from 4066 in 1999 to 2645 last year, despite a rise in recorded assaults by males against females in the same period from 6949 to 7526.

The services manager of Auckland agency Preventing Violence in the Home, Holly Carrington, said the courts were failing to enforce protection orders when men breached them by contacting their former partners or failing to attend anti-violence programmes.

"Here in Auckland the courts are a major problem in the response to family violence; a major barrier to the safety of victims," she said.

"Sentencing for family violence offenders is so inconsistent, and much more often than not they are way too lenient. They [offenders] have to practically kill someone to get a prison sentence."

A Women's Refuge report last year said that although refuges encouraged women to seek protection orders, "many women thought the orders were worthless or the women had lost faith in the justice system".

It said one factor deterring women from seeking protection orders was a growing trend for judges to put applications for such orders "on notice", giving men a chance to respond - and leaving women with no protection until the case was heard.

A joint submission to MPs by refuges and nine other agencies, quoted in a report last week by the Parliamentarians' Group on Population and Development, said the Family Court was "increasingly seen to be overriding the safety of women and children in favour of 'men's rights'."

Women's Refuge chief executive Heather Henare said there had been enormous pressure on judges from the fathers' rights movement, reflected in comments by Waitakere Judge Philip Recordon last week that men up for their first offence "at the lower end of the scale" should sometimes be discharged without conviction.

"If they have a protection order and their partner breaches that, there have to be some consequences from that," she said.

"If there are no consequences as a result of that breach, well it's pretty much word of mouth out there and women are going to be encouraging other women not to go for protection orders because there's no point anyway."

The Ministry of Women's Affairs has commissioned two Waikato University academics, lawyer Ruth Busch and psychologist Neville Robertson, to conduct a year-long study of protection orders, including the barriers preventing women from seeking them.

Dr Robertson said there was "a reasonably widespread belief that the orders are not necessarily providing protection, i.e. they are being breached and the enforcement of them is not that effective".

He and Dr Busch will seek input on the issue from groups attending a major domestic violence conference that starts in Auckland today.

An analysis by Justice Ministry analyst Elizabeth Bartlett suggests that judges are already responding to concerns, with an increase in protection orders placed "on notice" being sharply reversed since mid-2002, when "high-profile cases involving the deaths of children refocused media attention on family violence".

Convictions for males assaulting females increased at the same time, and Ms Bartlett suggests that police officers began tagging a higher proportion of cases as involving "family violence".

For example, the proportion of breaches of protection orders tagged as family violence rose from 75 per cent in 2001 to 85 per cent in 2003.

Male-assaults-female prosecutions rose from 4561 in 1999 to 6002 last year, but convictions for the same offence were stable at about 3000.

"If the underlying incidence of family violence has remained unchanged and police are more likely to charge offenders, then it could be expected that the cases which would not previously have been prosecuted will be the ones for which a conviction will be harder to obtain," Ms Bartlett says.

Chief Family Court Judge Peter Boshier suggested last year that the decline in protection orders might also be an effect of administrative changes rather than underlying social trends, because orders from previous years often stayed in force through subsequent years.

Orders sought in the initial years after the Domestic Violence Act came into force in 1995 might not need to be repeated in later years.